The Magic Mountain

I finally finished The Magic Mountain about our aimless young Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Swiss Alps and, in a Kafkaesque twist, ends up staying there for seven years because of a mild fever. Reading the book was like catching a mild fever (in a good way), and, in taking more than a year to finish it (I was reading many other books), I feel that I, too, absurdly overstayed the length of my visit.

I read the book once, independently, with no assistance from critical essays or lit professors. I could have benefited from a critical introduction and multiple readings, as there is a great deal of symbolism that went over my head. While I missed much, I still appreciated the novel--its ambitious length; its polished, literate prose; its absurd humor; its wit. Mann's writing has a cheerful, effervescent energy that carries the reader through effortlessly. Reading the book was like slaloming down a tall ski slope on a fresh crisp heap of powdered snow.

While I can't claim to understand the ultimate significance of the plot, I enjoyed the odd, humorous interactions of the characters, I was dazzled by Mann's brilliance, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed my stay in the sanitorium.

Believe it was Andre Gide who said we shouldn’t dismiss the novel of ideas because no one does it well - implying that he did. Well, I admire both THE COUNTERFEITERS and LAFCADIO’S ADVENTURES but for their art not their ideas, whatever they may be. For me THE STRANGER works because it contains only one idea, which convincingly obliterates all other ideas. But beyond Camus the novel of ideas holds little interest for me. Especially since the shelf life for most ideas is so short. So I avoided this mountain of ideas for decades. But climb it I finally did.

From Thomas Mann’s Foreword:
“We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail - for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling? Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.”

Fair enough. Forewarned is forearmed. The details are abundant and for the most part well chosen. Writing throughout is of the highest caliber. Not necessarily a caliber that will appeal, interest or awe you but nonetheless high as a mountain in terms of quality. I took special pleasure in “The Baptismal Bowl/Grandfather in His Two Forms,” “Teasing/Viaticum/Interrupted Merriment,” “Satana Makes Shameful Suggestions,” “Hippe,” “Doubts and Considerations,” “My God, I See It!,” “Humaniora,” “Dance Macabre,” “Walpurgis Night,” “Changes,” “Someone Else,” “Operationes Spirituales,” "Mynheer Peeperkorn (Conclusion)," and the profoundly moving literary art of “A Good Soldier.”

Other chapters are a real slog while some mix the bad with the good. “Snow,” for example, goes on and on about Hans Castorp learning to ski. You think it will never end. It only does after a blizzard overtakes then spellbinds Hans with a dream of fanciful Mediterranean vistas filled with pretty, healthy, happy people that turns on a dime into a brutal, savage nightmare of two naked old crones dismembering a child then devouring it piece by piece - at which point Hans collapses into the snow and awakes. Powerful stuff. Like all great dreams it is impenetrable; like all great dreams it says more than it means. More than a bit over the top but Mann’s enormous skill as a writer puts it across in a forcefully dramatic way that wins us over just as Wagner’s enormous skill as a composer puts across THE RING.

Much of the dialogue - and there’s tons of it - is intriguing. But sometimes you feel trapped in a Faculty Meeting with the worse faculty in the worst university in the world located, no doubt, somewhere in the Federal Republic of Germany. No surprise this book is loved by teachers, loathed by students. But THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN deserves better than to be doomed to the classroom. When I finished the novel, I admired the titanic size of the author’s ambition. I know it will stay with me in a way that many novels do not. Partly because of Mann’s great talent, partly because of my own effort to push through. It’s probably the kind of book that will mean much more to you once you’ve finished and absorbed it than when you were reading it.

Still in the end THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN’S emphasis on ideas at the expense of art appalled me. This is one baggy monster Henry James didn’t live to see. Worse: not baggy in the tolstoyan way, the dickensian way, the melvillian way, but baggy in the metaphysical German way of looking for all the answers to all life’s questions big and small. Noble, perhaps, but also fatiguing.

After my assault on the mountain, a teacher friend told me I’d gone about it all wrong. “You don’t read THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN,” he said, “you live it.” That is you don’t start reading and continue till you finish - three weeks, four weeks, whatever. No. You slow the process down. Read one section each week. But with 51 sections that means it will take you almost a year! Wrong, he said, longer since you’ll put off reading sometimes for pressing personal concerns. It might take even two years! His theory is that it puts you in the same position of Hans Castorp himself for whom time and the meaning of time is a frequent intellectual concern. Also when you read, go away, come back, you’re less likely to get bored. May find yourself looking forward to a weekly visit to the sanatorium. You may even miss Naphata and Settembrini - becoming fascinated by their arguments rather than seeing them as gasbags.

Maybe. Or maybe I’ll book a seat on the next toboggan down the mountain.

If ever a book was designed to be a slow burn, it's this one.

Mann strikes me as a writer who, more than almost anyone else, has a foot planted equally in the 19th and 20th century. He renders the the old world of genteel European manners and noblese oblige, with all its charming, if stuffy, formality, while at the same time sort of rhetorically rolling his eyes at its rigid idealisms. And he does all of that while ominously hinting at the universe of sickness, suffering and death that lies just around the corner in the world war era. Everything about The Magic Mountain seems loaded portent, meaning and an underlying sense of dread.

The prose in this is, by design, glacially slow. The seemingly endless descriptions of the Sanitarium's rooms, people's clothing, the food, the weather, etc. serve as a clear reminder of the sheer passing of time; of a peaceful, forgotten era of European history inevitably winding down as a murderous age draws ever closer in the background.

This is an impressive and seminal (and exhausting) work of high modernism. But as powerful as it is, I don't think it really 'wowed' me the way other 'big' hybrid works from this era have in the past.

Totally useless. Ca't understand what the publisher was thinking. I have read the book in both german and english. There was m effort to print the book the way a german book's language appears in the usual printed german editions. Basically unreadable.

Others here have given a good idea of what this novel is "about." And they have called attention to the fact that this translation is a great improvement over what previously existed.
I would like, however, to suggest a differing view of the novel than is generally found here. I suppose that over the last fifty years I've read this novel a half dozen or so times, both in the original German (when I was studying in Germany) and in translation. I find the whole idea of the drifting life of the classic Sanatoria to be intriguing, and hence go back the novel.
But I also find the whole work to be offensive, irritating, and over rated. What
most disturbs me (aside from the character of Setembrini who is a genuine ass), is the overweening superiority of the narrator (who is, I think it's fair to say, reliable, i.e., he speaks for Mann). What others find to be Han's learning processes (actually Hans learns nothing) I find to be Mann demonstrating -- showing off really -- the fact that he knows everything...art, literature, humanism, classicism, scholasticism, usw, usw. Everything. And he, the narrator/Mann, is SO superior to every character in the novel. Everyone is foolish or a fool but Mann. That is, perhaps characteristic of a certain kind of social satire, but when, say, Waugh does it, one feels the author/narrator enjoys his characters. When Mann does it, it communicates an arrogant distaste for everyone.
In the end it is an intriguing, sometimes enjoyable (how I would have liked to have spent my life on a balcony lying in a comfortable chair) but thoroughly unpleasant novel.

I was immersed in this extraordinary novel since visiting Davos in March - and it has taken me a third of a year to find my way through. Rather like Hans Castrop's three weeks that turn into seven years, the experience of reading The Magic Mountain made me lose all sense of time. I would hesitate to visit the hotel in Davos that the Berghof is based on as I suspect it is Switzerland's answer to Hotel California.

The novel is the story of a young man with latent hypochondriac tendencies who goes to visit his ailing cousin in a Swiss sanatorium. Before long, influenced by the charlatan-like physicians, Hans Castrop falls under the enchantment of illness. He is flattered to be admitted to what seems an elite, closed society 'up here' who have little to do except eat, flirt, have intellectual debates, lie wrapped up in blankets and obsessively measure their temperatures. This last aspect particularly amused me as I wonder what Mann would have made of today's narcissistic hypochondriacs with their apps and devices.

Love, life, time, death - and more - it's all there. The writing is at times humorous, at times beautifully lyrical (the chapter entitled "Snow"), at times deeply moving (the chapter entitled "A Soldier, and Brave") and rather too frequently for me, over-intellectual and impenetrable (Settembrini and Naptha's debates.)

Mann made a self-confessed "very arrogant request" that the book should be read twice. I might just take him up on it - but not this year.

It’s hard to write a review of such a sprawling, ambitious novel without focusing on just a few of the most salient ideas.

This is Mann’s magnum opus and, across 854 pages, he has ample time and space to expound upon many of the largest issues of life, including the nature of time, the meaning of health and illness, and the value of art, specifically literature.

Some of the concepts are particularly – or still – relevant to our lives in the 21st Century. First and foremost among them is the novel’s setting, a tuberculosis sanatorium that really functions as a refuge from the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Today, you could say the opioid epidemic and the spread of populist politics reflect widespread anxiety about the pace of technological, economic and societal change.

I also saw a clear connection between the life-denying, death-worshiping “spirituality” of one of the main characters (Naphta) and the contemporary manifestation of ISIS.

I could go on. The point is, even if “Magic Mountain” is firmly set in a particular location and era, it also timeless.

My copy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain has back cover copy describing it as a "...dizzyingly rich novel of ideas." I can't really top that as a summary. Although the presentation has some less than graceful moments, it is a well-written head trip.

The story is centers on Hans Castorp, a young shipbuilding engineer who goes to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a mountaintop sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland. Although he only planned to go for three weeks, he ends up staying for years--the ones leading up to the First World War. One of the more interesting aspects is that one years is covered in some detail while the rest of the time is treating as passing more quickly. Indeed the author explicitly states so. I'm reminded of Odysseus' stay on the island of Calypso where the detachment from the outside world is such that any sense of time is lost. Indeed, the never-changing ritual of life at the sanitorium is conducive to that, with the only changes being in the coming and going (through departure of death) of the residents.

The patients at the sanitorium come from all over Europe, representing a microcosm of European society--at least, those strata of society that can afford stays as the place. Perhaps the most interesting are Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naptha. Settembrini, a self-described humanist, represents the optimistic, rationalist worldview that would be sharply disillusioned by WWI. Naptha starts out as a conservative Catholic turned pro-violence totalitarian. Their regular debates are interesting but arguably the only semi-clumsy note in the novel since they are didactic set pieces that violate the "show, don't tell" rule. Other important influcences are Zeimssen, a military officer with a strong sense of duty; Fraulein Chauchat, a love interest of Castorp and the hedonistic Mynheer Pepperkorn.

Castorp is appropriately passive. His "job", so to speak, is as an absorber of these influences; an Everyman who is the target of the influences represented by the above characters, especially Naptha and Settembrini that tried to influence society as a whole.

The Magic Mountain is a long work (my version is 700 pages) but I only intermittently felt the length of it.

Mann's masterpiece is one of those books I thought I should have read in college or grad school, but hadn't .So, I persuaded my UChicago Book Club to choose it for our last book. For the first one-third of the book, I was regretting our decision. Very little happens. The beauty of Mann's writing made the experience tolerable. In the second third characters come to life and interest and concern for them increases, especially for "our hero", Han Castorp. The last third is action-packed enough to satisfy any adrenaline junkie. So, for anyone who undertakes reading this great beast of a book and begins to waver early on, hang in there. It is a masterpiece and will prove well worth the hours and days of effort to reach the conclusion.

I tried to read this in my youth but gave up; however after recently discovering Mann's superlative 'Buddenbrooks', thought I would give it another go.
From the point of view of narrative, Mann sustained my interest throughout. The account of young Hans Castorp, on the brink of a career, who goes to pay a brief visit to a consumptive cousin in a Swiss sanatorium but ends up staying so much longer; the description of life in an institution - albeit a luxurious one; the treatment of the disease in the early years of the 20th century were of great interest. And as events take their toll, and we reach the seance scene - and indeed the ending of the story - Mann's lovely writing brings tears to one's eyes.

However the narrative is interspersed with great sections of philosophical musings, as Hans becomes acquainted with two opposing mentors, Settembrini and Naphta, ('it was again impossible to distinguish which side was in the right, where God stood and where the Devil, where death and where life') whose lengthy and obscure harangues made this reader's heart sink, and felt like wading through porridge. I absolutely confess to only getting the drift of a small percentage of this, coming to identify with the character Ferge, "to whom all elevated thoughts were foreign."
Rating the novel is thus difficult, as I fully realise that loftier minds than mine have been able to appreciate Mann's work. And that the author himself, in his postscript, requests 'that it be read not once but twice' to get 'a deeper enjoyment.'

I shan't be re-reading it; I have to say that when I finally reached page 716 I shouted 'hurrah! I've done it!' It's lovely in parts but mighty heavy going.

"Magic Mountain" is a coming of age story with a twist - what drives Castorp's increasing maturity is the relative isolation and time to reflect in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Indeed the heart of the novel are these reflections and philosophical discussions broadened by subjects such as medicine, music, politics. At times I found the intellectual content repetitious or dull, but more often it was animated by such characters as Settembrini, the would be activist and pedagogue, and by Mann's eloquence, his quality as a thinker and devil's advocate, and his breadth of knowledge; for example, some of the discussion of time strongly suggests Mann had some familiarity with Einstein's theory of relativity as well as a fine classical education and a deep appreciation of music.

As a retired senior citizen it was easy to see the parallels between our lives and those of the inhabitants of the sanatorium, with the focus on health, looming death, the relative absence of responsibilities, and the ability to rise above all this to varying degrees, again exemplified by Settembrini and Castorp. Mann captures the life of the sanatorium beautifully, sometimes with humor. The humanity of the relationships Castorp develops adds warmth to the novel: relationships with his cousin, with Settembrini, with the outsized personality of Peeperkorn and ultimately with the woman he is infatuated with. Castorp succeeds brilliantly when he decides to bring succor to patients who are particularly close to death and alone, further warming the heart of the reader.

Do not fail to read Mann's afterword in the Modern Library edition. In one surprise, he thanks 2 critics who "remind him of things in it (the novel) he has forgotten or indeed never quite knew".

Mann has droll fun in this classic book.

It tells the story of Hans, a dull and plodding fellow

who visits his cousin in a TB sanitarium. While there,

the head doctor discovers TB in Hans. Hans must stay

and live the life of an invalid. He hesitates. Then he bumbles

ahead.

Mann makes him a believable fool. We laugh

at his gaffes. We encourage him to learn from

Herr Settembrini, an artist of the beautiful ideal and

the noble gesture. We see him timidly tumble into

puppy-love with the beauty Claudia.

Hans moves further into the kingdom of the mind. An

afternoon dream re-awakens his vague worship

of another school-boy years ago. In this dream, Mann

suggests everything and nothing at the same time.

It is his constant theme of admiring beauty, no matter

where one finds it. Man, woman or cathedral, it seems

all the same to Mann.

Hans strives on. He adventures into speaking his

love to Claudia in a dream-like night orgy. He explores

the universe of right and wrong, all in this

sanitarium.

The story has great moments of gentle fun. We can

image Mann smiling a droll smile, off to the side of

the stage that he has set.

The story is told in an almost medieval style. But the

humor is timeless. Every reader who gets past the

fortress of the opening pages will enjoy spinning past

the humor.

One may read the sanitarium as a miniature of Europe

just before World War One. Or one may reach further

back and view it in the German tradition of a youngster

sallying forth to learn chivalry and become a knight.

Get through this rich but weighty book. It will

change your life.

--- Frank Hickey, Retired LAPD Officer and writer of the

Max Royster crime novels of Pigtown Books.

While reading the first three hundred pages or so, I must have thought about throwing this book into the recycle bin at least a dozen times. I hated it! It went nowhere! Now that I have finally finished it, there are tears in my eyes because the effect it had on me. This sounds crazy, but I think it is a not uncommon reaction among readers. The novel got more interesting after the first 300 pages when I realized that I was up there on the magic mountain with Hans, and there was after all nothing to be afraid of or worried about except that little damp spot on my left lung and what I would read during my afternoon rest cures. It is then I suddenly stopped waiting for something to happen, and began to say goodbye to the bustling flatlands below, to hell with them, and to just enjoy the experience of being above it all. I also fell in love with the characters; they became personal friends almost. It was probably also a case of gradually warming to Mann's highly ironic writing style. Once I finished the work, there was an emotionally powerful effect of looking back upon the entire story from the position of the last pages. Now one is down in the flatlands again, in the trenches of the Great War; and Hans gradually disappears into the anonymity of the field of battle.

The phenomenological philosopher László Tengelyi, in his book "The Wild Region in Life-History", discusses Hans Castorp's personal transformation throughout the novel and the role that time plays. Mann asks, "Can one tell -- that is to say, narrate -- time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?" The novel raises the fundamental question of not only every time novel but of every life-history as well. Tengelyi says the novel "offers a term as an answer, which implies that a life-history is permeated with a mysterious unity. That term is destiny." In his debate with Mynheer Peeperkorn, Hans indirectly refers to the idea one's destiny:

"For love of her [Clavdia Chauchat], in defiance of Herr Setembrini, I declared myself for the principle of unreason, the spiritual principle of disease, under whose aegis I had already, in reality, stood for a long time back, and I remained up here. I no longer know precisely how long. . ."

Destiny: meaning "For a long time back". This idea of destiny, says Tengelyi, offers an answer to the fundamental question of all life stories: although time, "time itself, for its own sake" cannot be narrated, we are able to recount time woven into a destiny. Yet the last pages of the novel relate that although Hans may very well have stood under the aegis of the spiritual principle of disease for a long time back, he does not in the end remain on the magic mountain. Tengelyi's book explores this question further, as he introduces the idea of a destinal event: a radical turn in life-history. "A fatal event will only become a destinal event if it is not simply met but it strikes someone down in his or her alleged self-identity." It seems this is what happens to Hans at the end of the novel. Where Hans had sought to realize his own destiny as "life's problem child", apart from the world below in the flatlands, never attending to what was going on down there, that other world down below finally forced reality upon him, forced him to create a new beginning in his life history. In this way the novel underscores the fact that we are never fully in control of our life stories. As Tengelyi writes, "The field of one's own experience is profoundly marked by a difference between what is, in fact, one's own and what is, in reality, alien to oneself. In other words, the experience one gains never fails to include some hints at the experiences others gain, have gained, or may gain."

This is a novel that will remain with me for a long, long time, and one I plan to return to in the future whenever these flatlands get to me and I need to take another restful journey to the International Sanatorium Berghoff.

Finally, after 30 years, I’ve closed the gap and completed the task that Thomas Mann, in his afterword to the novel, suggests for his readers: to read The Magic Mountain not once but twice.

My first reading of it was in the spring and summer of 1982, when I was 23. It was not the first of his works that I had read, for I had already made my way through his short stories, including “Death in Venice”, and before any of those, his late novel Doctor Faustus, which I read first because it happened to be on the bookshelf at home. Even so, it was not our book, for it was on loan from my mother’s friend Dorothy Burt, an avid reader, a close friend of Malcolm Lowry, and a passionate fan of Thomas Mann. It was Dorothy who first made me want to read Thomas Mann, and Dorothy, wherever you are: thank you.

I enjoyed The Magic Mountain very much the first time through, although I was not in a position to get a great deal out of it except the pleasure of sojourning at length in that world of his creation, populated with so many striking and memorable characters. Although I was a writer myself, even a serious one, I did not have the experience or the literary education to appreciate it for its deeper qualities, beyond the realization that these deeper qualities were there to be plumbed by the knowledgeable.

By 1982 I had already read Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology, but I don’t recall applying any of Campbell’s thoughts on that first reading of The Magic Mountain. However, the next time I read Creative Mythology, I paid much more attention to his discussion of The Magic Mountain and his comparison of it with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Campbell regarded them as the two greatest novels of the 20th century, and held them up as examples and products of the unfolding and altogether unprecedented mythology of the modern West: a mythology created not by prophets, priests, or shamans, but by “adequate” individuals—people with the courage and integrity to be their own unique selves. The conveyor of this new “creative” mythology is the artist who is true to his own conscience and his own experience of value, and Campbell regarded Joyce and Mann as the preeminent voices of this new mythology in the literary field.

So The Magic Mountain, set in the years before World War I, is the story of a 22-year-old German, Hans Castorp, who travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joaquim, a young soldier who is taking the rest cure to rid himself of infection before embarking on his military career. Castorp, for his part, is merely taking a quick break before he himself embarks on his own chosen career in nautical engineering. He plans to stay for three weeks.

He stays longer. Much longer. For the bacillus is discovered in his own lungs, and the medical director, Hofrat Behrens, advises him that he too will need to clear his infection before returning to the “flatlands.” So young Castorp settles in to life among the international clientele of the Berghof.

It is a strange life of indolence and routine, in a setting of sumptuous luxury and scenic splendor. Ordinary concepts of time vanish, and before long one forgets about the world below and one’s interests in it, and becomes a feverish, sometimes moribund, patient with little on one’s mind but passing amusements, gossip, and flirtations.

At least, that describes the typical sanatorium patient; everyone is different. One important friendship for Castorp up here is with the down-at-heel Italian pedagogue Ludovico Settembrini, who views the Berghof and its denizens with an ironic and mocking eye. Another important relationship is with the patient Clavdia Chauchat, an attractive and mysterious creature from the wastes of central Russia.

The story is subtle, meandering, and takes its time (my disintegrating pocketbook edition—the same yellow one I read in 1982—runs to 727 pages). If you’re in a rush, this book is not for you. But then, the whole idea of being in a rush is what those at the Berghof would call a “flatland” preoccupation. It arises from a vulgar, bourgeois, and thoughtless attitude toward the great mystery of time. For Hans Castorp, in stepping off the little train in the alpine village, enters what we would now call a time warp, and he soon discovers that he hasn’t the least idea of what time is or how it works. What exactly is it? Indeed, at one point in the book the narrator confides that he is telling a “time-romance”.

That is all I will say about the story itself. Mann is a master artist and he has woven his literary tapestry with great care. I see that it is described as a “novel of ideas”, and I suppose it is; but then I regard every novel as a novel of ideas. Yes, characters talk about ideas, and there is a lot of abstract talk in the book; maybe too much. But that is the milieu here; it is the time and place. The world has not yet slid off the cliff into the conflagration of world war. Ideas are part, but only a part, of Castorp’s journey. Without knowing it, he is on an inward quest of self-discovery, and the the seeming outward events mirror back to him the transformations happening within his own soul, as within the chrysalis of the butterfly.

Is The Magic Mountain the greatest novel of the 20th century? That’s a matter of opinion. In mine, it’s certainly one of them. After this my second reading, I intend to reflect on the book and its meaning over the coming days and weeks, and I fully expect it to repay that reflection. I thought that I couldn’t truly enjoy fiction-reading anymore, but The Magic Mountain has reminded me that I can.

Thank you, Dorothy Burt.

Just a brief note rather than a review to point out two anecdotes about this book, both of which may be apocryphal but si non vero, bene trovato ...

Susan Sontag read THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN in her teens and was so ensorcelled by the book that she took it to bed with her at night, not to read it, to sleep with it. You could say she felt married to it.

After Ava Gardner married Artie Shaw, he gave her a copy of the book, and after a few months of attempting to read it and being bored to tears by it, she divorced Shaw.

Of course, these stories can't be true as stated, but it's quite possible there's a kernel of truth in them.

Burning passion and excruciating boredom: how many classic novels evoke these feelings? Most of them, I'd guess.

Myself, I think THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN is Mann's greatest novel.

A very tedious book which attempts to philosophize on time, death, life, goals, character, and the meaning of life. The main attraction is the sentence structure and the endless allusions to spending time without any purpose or task.

The Magic Mountain is an enchanting novel by German novelist and short story writer, Thomas Mann (1875-1955), who received the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. This tour de force novel relates the story of Hans Castorp, a young engineer who goes to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland, The Berghof, "The Magic Mountain." Hans' last name Castorp perhaps alludes to the mythic twin Roman gods Castor and Pollux engendered in the close relationship between Hans and his cousin Joachim.

It turns out that The Berghof becomes a comfortable and dreamlike, totally enchanting place for Hans Castorp who finds himself unable to cut short his visit and return home to face the world as a young engineer. Instead, he becomes enamored of a charming aristocratic Russian lady, Madame Clavdia Chauchat, and the Magic Mountain itself. Moreover, it soon becomes obvious that Hans may also be infected with the tubercle bacillus, increasing the complexity of his situation and providing him with a valid reason to stay on the Magic Mountain. Castorp stays at the Berghof for seven years and only leaves to join the German army with the advent of World War I.

The novel provides a vehicle for Mann to discuss the advances and mysteries in medicine -- for example, the use of x-rays, which had only been discovered in 1895 by the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, and Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis and his theory of the unconscious. The novel also serves as a medium to describe complex personal inter-relationships and social interactions in society at large, and even more profoundly, the toll of diseases and human suffering, ultimately death and dying, as metaphors for man's existence, journey and final exit on this planet.

Simply, this is one of the best and greatest books of all times, and the Franklin Library edition is a collector's choice. Recommended without reservations with 5 stars. I have also read and reviewed the leather Franklin addition. Both editions deserve the same review — 5 stars for a magnificent book and excellent translations!

Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D. is an Associate Editor in Chief and World Affairs Editor of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is the author of Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (1995) and Cuba in Revolution -- Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002).

Borrowing a phrase from another Thomas, it might have been more fitting if the English translation of this book were titled "Time and the Mountain" ... but Mann's book came before Wolfe's.
Not much happens in this book of almost 800 pages. The hero, Hans Castorp, arrives at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland to visit his cousin for three weeks. During that time he falls in love with a patient from the Dagestan region of Russia and is diagnosed as being ill himself. As a result of the illness he has to prolong his stay and is eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis himself. He ends up staying for seven years, and has lots of conversations with other patients; in the course of those seven years, he witnesses the death of his cousin and two suicides, and his love interest vanishes (we don't find out where to or with what emotional consequences for the hero). In the end, he leaves to fight (and most likely die) in the First World War, which has just broken out. That, in essence, is it. And yet in spite of this dearth of "action" every one of the 800 pages is fascinating, on many different levels.
On one level, the novel can, I think, be read as a morality play in which the Jewish Communist Jesuit (sic!) Leo Naphta represents Passion, the Italian liberal humanist Lodovico Settembrini Reason, and the Dutch business mogul Pieter Peeperkorn Action. Mann uses the interactions of Castorp with these characters, and their interactions with each other, to illustrate the problems that arise when each of these appears in isolation, unbalanced by the others: all are self-destructive - fiery Passion becomes violent fanaticism; Reason spins endless plans and projects for reforming the world and writing a utopian encyclopedia; both Action and Passion end up committing suicide.
The book can also be read is as an exploration of language - and again this seems to occur on more than one level. On the most obvious level, Mann displays his talent for differentiating his characters by giving each of them a unique voice, a unique rhetorical style, ranging from Castorp's clumsy and naïve style, to Peeperkorn's endlessly elaborate formulations of pure nothingness, to Settembrini's highly eloquent rhetorical style. Upon reflection, however, what is perhaps even more striking is that almost all of what is said in the endless disputes in which the protagonists cross their rhetorical swords is essentially pure nonsense. The novel was published in 1929, and although its action takes place in the run-up to the First World War, it is clear that Mann was preoccupied with the lengthening shadow of dictatorship falling over Europe in the 1920s (republics had already given way to dictatorships in Italy and Poland, and the rise of dictators in Austria and Germany was only four years away). Mann makes his Swiss sanatorium a sort of microcosmic arena in which these problems are played out, and his concern is to show us where the use, and - more importantly - abuse, of language was leading Europe. This lesson remains as important nearly 80 years later as on the day of the book's publication.

Well it took me a year of off and on reading, but I finally finished it. The problem with longer books is that they are up and down. Overall I would say this was a really decent read though. I particularly enjoyed the arguments between Settembrini and Naphta. They really capture the spirit of the times. I can almost see a similar environment in Amerca today, I guess we will have a huge war sometime soon lol. An aquaintence of mine said once that he felt like he should take a philosophy course before reading this book, though he may of had tongue in cheek, there is quite a bit of philosophising in here. You are exposed to a great many extremes of thought which are fascinating. When you sit back and observe all the things that happen in the book you really do begin to see Europe right before the war as a microcosm at the sanitarium.

The Magic Mountain is a renowned classic of twentieth century literature, especially German and European literature. As a book, it is moderate to easy to read, and I highly recommend the novel. It is easier to read than some of Mann's other works. I recently purchased and read this exact novel as shown.

The novel is set near Davos, Switzerland, just before the outbreak of World War I. The story was inspired by Mann's own visit to a clinic in Davos when his wife was admitted to a similar clinic when she was suffering from a lung ailment.

Without giving away the plot, the story is about a young man, Hans Castorp who comes to the mountain clinic for a brief visit to see a relative, a man of a similar age, who is a patient. He becomes caught up in clinic life. Mann uses his stay at the clinic as a vehicle to explore issues of European bourgeois society, including the destructiveness of the society as a whole. Mann presents a story with six main characters who discuss, debate, or represent various aspects of morality and behavior including health, illness, sexuality and religion. At an earlier time, Mann had planned on making the book a short satire, but he changed his mind and developed it into a full novel - which has become a masterpiece - and not difficult to read compared with some of Mann's other works.

The patients are cut off from civilization, or what the patients call the "flatlands" in the book. They are living in their own small world and are fed sumptuous meals along with wines many times a day. Between the meals, they meet, they leave the clinic and go on walks, they have discussions and sometimes flirt. Isolated as they are, they live in a magic and artificial world surrounded by the natural beauties and the wonders of the Swiss mountains. The weather in Davos lacks sharp seasonal changes. It can snow in the summer; and, in the unchanging weather and repetitive daily routine they lose the feeling for time and they lose their perspectives.

Without giving away the plot, Castorp, comes for a short stay of three weeks to visit his cousin. With a degree of foreboding, he stays on. He develops a secret lust after a fellow patient, a Russia woman, Madame Chaucat, who is married but whose husband is far away. Of the six main characters, Clavdia Chauchat represents erotic temptation and lust. Castorp and his cousin represent the values of current pre-World War I German society.

He engages in conversations with fellow patients, and among them he is regarded as a proper German man with the German reservations and morality. Outside the clinic, they take walks where he becomes friends with Settembrini, an Italian, who is a liberal, a humanist, a supporter of the democratic ideals, and morality. Settembrini comes into conflict with Naphta, the fifth main character, who represents the forces of decay, of radicalism and extremism. fascism, anarchism, and communism. The story is complicated by a sixth character, Mynheer Peepercorn, who enters towards the end of the story.

Added to all of this is Mann's own love of music which he mixes in near the end, plus surprisingly for the reader, a touch of the supernatural, which actually spoils the book a bit.

This is a highly entertaining and worthwhile read.

Anyone who is preoccupied with the cares of the "flatland", who lives busily working away with the sense that everything will keep humming along indefinitely, will find this book a waste of time. The main character, Hans Castorp, takes leave of his life in the lowlands of northern Germany at first on a vacation, but then due to a lingering illness stays on at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland for what turns out to be an ominous seven years: the time leading up to the outbreak of World War I. From a life of comfort and security, in which he follows the well-defined and socially-acceptable track of becoming an Engineer, he finds himself transported with an unknown future to a rarefied mountain world, in which death is stalking.

The narrative moves briskly at the beginning, much like I remember BUDDENBROOKS, but soon the author gets into a different kind of territory and sabotages the running narrative by lengthy descriptions. At one point, he takes almost an entire page to describe Hans taking his temperature (in keeping with the theme of time). What drew me into this descriptive style concerned the events as they unfolded: certainly, Hans's attraction to Clavdia Chauchat, the fate of his cousin Joachim, the doings of the patients at the sanatorium in the face of death; and especially, the perceptive way of the author in noting all those personal concerns that are often skipped over in the usual rush and roar of everyday life.

On one level, this book is about the education of Hans Castorp - an education all-together different from what he would get in the flatland. We get introduced to the long-winded discourse of Settembrini, the secular humanist ; and as a counterpoint, Naphta and his incessant arguments defending the authoritarianism of the Church. These two represent the European conflict between the legacy of the Greeks and the religion imported from the deserts of the Levant. They, along with others such as Rhadamanthus and Peeperkorn, more closely resemble operatic characters than actual flesh and blood characters. They engage more in soliloquies than dialogue, and they confront and challenge Hans.

On a deeper level, Hans can be seen as embarking upon a spiritual quest, which is certainly unlike the material quest that he was following in the flatland. The quest for the Holy Grail in Western Mythology is a quest that can only be undertaken by a unique individual on a path not traveled ever before by anyone else, by the most difficult of possible ways. Hans is as Settembrini calls him: "the delicate child of life". But he is tested in his own way by the very immediate presence of death and disease; and he is also tested when he gets lost in a snowstorm.

Thomas Mann was one of the foremost philosophical novelists of the early 20th century. He saw the world as diseased, as described by artists and intellectuals much like himself. Because he was just such an artist/philosopher, most of his novels ring with the details of autobiography. In THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN he writes of Hans Castorp, who exemplifies the anguished artist who suffers greatly in the European society during and after the First World War. Castorp is a successful middle-class business man who does not know it at the start of the novel but his life has a huge spiritual void in it, one that remains unfulfilled until he visits a sick cousin at a German health sanatorium. His original plan is to stay for just a few weeks, but when he learns that he has contracted tuberculosis, his stay becomes indefinite. What he learns about himself, his fellow inmates, and the world at large form the bulk of the book.

The sanatorium is located high in the rarified Swiss mountains. In such an atmosphere, time has a habit of ceasing to be. Each day is just like the next so that the serene unchanging atmosphere is conducive for the intellectual to ponder the Mysteries of the Universe. Later Castorp will view this serenity as too much of a good thing, but at the start of his sojourn, peace and quiet are what he needs. While there, he meets several inmates, all of whom seem to be there more for spiritual than medical reasons. Each of them tries to inculcate a mindset in Castorp that matches his own. There is Settembrini, the realist and humanist who loves to debate whoever will listen about the common fate of man. There is Naphta, a Jew converted to Catholicism, who is the opposite of Settembrini in his insistence on the superiority of the spiritual over the rational. Naturally, both Settembrini and Naptha take turns haranguing Castorp. There is Clavdia Chauchat, a Russian woman with whom Castorp has a brief but stormy affair. And then there is Mynheer Peeperkorn, a rich Dutchman whose inability to articulate his thoughts Castorp finds engaging. All of these collectively induce Castorp to remain for seven years. When Castorp enters the sanatorium his mind is very nearly a philosophical tabula rasa, a blank slate in which they cannot resist scribbling in their unique perspective on life, death, and the absurdities engendered by the interaction of the two.

Castorp changes during the course of the novel, as well he must given his daily debates with his fellow inmates and his extended periods of isolation that allow him to digest their views so that he may find his own way. Slowly and painfully he succeeds. His tuberculosis becomes secondary to his regeneration of self. He unwisely takes a walk alone in a snowstorm and has a spiritual epiphany which Mann describes in allegorical terms such that for him life and death are but opposite sides of one coin. Eventually, his perspective expands so that he can now see the isolation of his seven years were not the end, but merely the means to his own understanding of himself and his world. When he realizes this, he can leave the cocoon of the sanatorium for the world outside, even knowing that the unspeakable horrors of trench warfare await. For Mann, this too was an epiphany that suggests that vibrant life however ugly and nasty it might be is preferable to the sainted and unchallenged life of seclusion. Castorp grew to realize that the magic of an isolated mountain is a two-edged sword even if most of his fellow inmates did not.

Just to be clear, I've only read the Lowe-Porter translation, though I plan at some point to follow Mann's advice and give it a once-again with the new Woods version. For those not accustomed to fairly dense or philosophical works of fiction, the task here presented to the reader will likely prove new and exciting. I'm not going to say "difficult" or "intimidating" because, with a bit of patience and intelligence, the novel is accessible and even enjoyable in a certain idiosyncratic way.

The Lowe-Porter translation is certainly worth the time as long as one is willing to entertain the idea of paragraph-length sentences and multi-clause complexes loaded with such devices as are available to the would-be Germanizer of the English language: commas, dashes, semicolons, ellipses... mostly the first two. The translation also deftly utilizes an impressive vocabulary, and I kept a pen and pad handy with a dictionary to take notes and learn new native words from a novelist whose second language is my first. Above all--and I have come to this opinion after having worked my way through the book carefully and slowly and, in all sincerity, with great enjoyment--reading Thomas Mann will make you a better writer and thinker. The same probably goes for many of the great works of literary fiction, but here is a modern author whose imagination and love for ideas and abstraction I find very dear to my own intellectual sentiments.

As far as accessibility, an introductory knowledge of Nietzsche is extremely helpful in particular. Schopenhauer's influence shows itself clearly in the concern for time and the subjectivity of its experience, but I believe Nietzsche's ideas are very nearly more pervasive on the whole. They also have less to do with the aesthetics of the novel and more with its content, meaning that their potential for distracting the unsuspecting reader and detracting from his or her sense of literary enjoyment becomes a real issue. That being said, the back-and-forth between Settembrini and Naphta is intellectually engaging, particularly for those with a background or interest in German philosophy. Fortunately, Mann saves the novel from suffocating in this kind of mental gymnastic by interspersing predominately narrative chapters--lulls in the intellectual hyper-articulation surrounding some of the main characters.

Who should read this book? I'm not entirely sure... nearly everyone who garners an interest I suppose. I hesitate to call the novel "modernist" in contradistinction to "post-modernist" because the intellectual motifs revolve so dependently around Nietzschean concerns. The issue of life and death, for instance--whether death is an absolute negation or something positive and life-worthy--is reminiscent of Nietzsche's dialectical approach to the same issue. Undoubtedly Nietzsche (and perhaps Mann himself) often assumes the enlightenment, progressive, bourgeois-liberal side manifested in Settembrini. But some aspects don't match up: Nietzsche wasn't liberal or progressive, and decried the bourgeois values of his time. In some ways, S. and Naphta seem to represent two unacceptable oppositions of a dualism, some kind of Nietzchean inspired set of polarities designed for the purposes of philosophical dialogue.

In the end, however, I believe Nietzsche and Mann would come down qualifiedly on the side of Settembrini. This seems fairly obvious by the conclusion of the novel, though the introduction of Peeperkorn is another issue altogether: a character we the reader learn both to love and hate. A character whose physical presence and prowess inspire a certain awe but whose skill in articulation shrivels in comparison to the above mentioned antagonists, Peeperkorn is at once personally fascinating and intellectually repulsive. Though I found myself repeatedly sympathizing with Settembrini in Peeperkorn's presence, I could at most blindly affirm the former's academic optimism in the face of the child-like carelessness that is Peeperkorn. Is Peeperkorn really Nietzche's mature vision of the Dionysian principle? The idea changed in Nietzche's thought, later to emerge as something closer to the intellectual maturity represented by Settembrini. On this account, I can only dismiss Peeperkorn as too unrealistic and unconcerned, or perhaps merely too lacking in a mature and universal humanistic spirit.

Whatever one's interpretation, the book is the ultimate in fictional food for thought. I believe it is also tremendously enjoyable to a certain kind of intellectual sentiment: philosophical, conceptual, abstract, patient and slow moving, perhaps a little pessimistic. I recommend without much reservation the Lowe-Porter translation, not as a substitute for Woods but as a work of creative literary articulation in itself.

I have read this novel three times and I love it more and more everytime. It is true: this is a difficult, long reading, but it is worth your time. The first time it took me about six months to finish it... and I think that it is the best way to read this novel. The reader goes along with the main character through the most interesting trip. Hans Castorp goes to Davos-Platz in order to pay a visit to a cousin of him who is being treated in a hospital up in the mountains. Way up. Joachim, the cousin, suffers tuberculosis and must be contained in the cold enviroment so the illness is kept under control. Hans is supposed to stay with his cousin for three weeks, but his plans extend themselves as an unusual attraction develops between him and a russian woman. He and Joachim are joined by the philosopher Settembrini, with whom they talk about the nature of sickness and a supposed respect towards sick people. The rythm of the novel is the most interesting I have ever seen in a work of fiction (Thomas Mann really handles the rythm of events like no one else: how much should an event be explored or briefly described). Join Hans in his trip to a hospital, to the heights of a mountain, to his own physical degradation, to his intellectual developments. Meet along with him Settembrini, Naphta (who was based in the wonderfull philosopher and critic Georg Lucáks), Peeper, the doctors... Live with him the time when he lost his way and had the most wonderfull hallucination I have ever read, live the sessions in which he and his mates meet the world of the spirits... hear his intellecutual divagations. There is so much in this novel... I can only compare it to Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Go into the magic of the reality... the real world is magical, more than in terms of phantasy, in terms of our own minds, our inheritance and our experience of time (rythm). To read this novel is to get deeper in the experience of time itself.

Considered a modern classic, it's a long and in many ways, difficult. Let me say that involves illness, death, love and war. It's. set in a sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland just before WW I. Everryone there is ill so some recover, many die, some leave and return worse off. The book is considered a Bildungsroman, however, not like many others in that he makes a decision to go war. At that, I thought on how bloody and utterly sad that war was--with those soggy trenches.This novel may seem "old fashioned " to the modern reader, yet it presents timeless topics that are always with us.

T. Mann is not among my favorite writers, but I can't deny that he was a master of the German language. I can't find anything wrong with his style, other than that it is artificially complicated and inflated with redundancies and an excessive use of monstrous nouns. The German language is flexible in the construction of nouns. Mann's writing was overindulgent in this vice. (If he determined your impression of the German language, maybe during high school struggles, rest assured that Mann's usage was untypical. He was a comedian at heart, with a morbid sense of humor.)

Mann said himself, early in the book, that only long and detailed narrations can be entertaining. He surely strove hard to be entertaining in that sense.
His reputation as a serious writer and as a bore is unfair. He was quite amusing, if often annoying. His way of poking fun is not of the `nice' kind, he does not laugh `with' his victims, but destroys them with his scorn. His mean streak in satirizing people is not an endearing habit. He ridicules not only through descriptions of behavior, looks, and dress, but also by their names: Gerngross (would like to be great), Blumenkohl (cauliflower), Rotbein (red leg), Einhuf (one hoof), and so on and on and on. Real people sometimes have such names, but Mann amasses them and that is meant to be funny.

He mocks. He mocks the medical industry and psycho-analysis. He mocks humanism and progressivism and enlightenment. He mocks science and progress. Was he still stuck in his abominable nationalism of WW1 times or was he mocking himself?
The book has been called a Bildungsroman. Indeed, we follow Hans Castorp's mental development, we watch him discuss politics and philosophies and scientific concepts, we watch him read his way into modern science of the time. But is Mann really interested in the man? I don't think so. Castorp is just a pawn in the larger scope of un-serious world views. Mann never drops the attitude of the outsider who will not be part of anything.

A young man from a Buddenbrookian background, before WW1, visits his cousin in a pulmonary sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, for 3 weeks. The visit turns into months and years, when it is discovered that he is suffering from the same affliction as his cousin.
He soon becomes attracted to a Russian woman who reminds him of a boyish infatuation with a male classmate with similar `Kirgisian' eyes - the homoerotic element was omnipresent in Mann's work. Even the name of the woman (Madame Chauchat) indicates that Hans sees her as an ambivalent creature in the sexual sense: is she a tomcat to him? The chapter Walpurgisnacht (witches' ball) is one of the highlights: during a carnival party at the sanatorium, Hans loosens up under alcohol and starts a real conversation with his flame. She speaks little German, his French is shaky. We observe a hot flirt under precarious conditions. We don't really learn what happened that night. So much is certain: Hans manages to ask Clowdia to lend him her pencil... That was as far as he got with the boy at school 10 years ago. He manages to return Clowdia's pencil before she leaves for home (Daghestan) next day. Use your imagination!

The world of the sanatorium is a microcosm of ideologies and a ship of fools, wrecked on a mountain slope. How marvelous that this could provide material for nearly 1000 pages. A main theme of the ruminations is time. Another theme is the value and role of disease for life. Is it a form of immorality? The deputy chief doctor, with Eastern European accent, delivers lectures on Love and Disease.
Humanist Settembrini is employed by the project of an Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Suffering. His personal contribution will be about world literature and suffering.
Settembrini finds his ideological nemesis in a scholastic dialectician called Naphta, who also provides the occasion for various anti-semitic comments by other people. Mann was himself never quite free from that affliction, despite his own close family affiliation to German Jews.
Naphta turns out to be a prophet of terror, an apologist of totalitarianism. Youth does not want freedom, it wants instruction! Hans feels at home on the magic mountain, as Anselm Eibenschuetz in Joseph Roth's story felt at home in the army.
The Naphta passages are unsatisfactory. They turn the easygoing banter of the Settembrini dialogues into something rather too earnest considering that Mann was never seriously committing himself (other than to his success as a writer). They are cliché-ridden caricatures of the intellectually superior Jesuit of Jewish origin.

A great novel that I do not manage to like wholeheartedly.

This translation of 'The Magic Mountain' by John E. Woods should be your choice to attempt to tackle this large, complex book. Why? Is there really a difference between H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation compared to Woods’ translation? Yes, there is!

For example, in Lowe-Porter’s translation, in the chapter of “Walpurgis-Night,” there is a key part of the whole book where the protagonist, Hans Castorp, is speaking with Clavdia Chauchat, the love of his life. They conduct a long conversation in French. Lowe-Porter’s translation does NOT bother to translate this French dialogue into English! Yes, that is correct; for those of us who do not speak (or read) French, you are on your own. Fortunately, Woods’ translation translates this key dialogue of the book into English.

And Woods’ translation is a much more effective read; reading Thomas Mann is not easy, and Lowe-Porter’s translation did not make it any easier. Woods, however, has captured the ‘cadence’ (or ‘pace’) of Mann’s writing, and uses words and phrases much more understandable to your average reader.

As for the book itself? Well, many reviewers have commented on how reading this large, yet dense book is a figurative example of the book’s title; they feel as though they have scaled a mountain when they have finished reading the book. My feeling is different: reading The 'Magic Mountain' is like running a marathon, where in the process of running all the 20+ miles, one encounters some stretches that are tough to traverse, and at other times one is running through stretches where the scenery is fantastic, and the going is actually smooth. This is my overall view of the book. Some parts of the book are some of the finest fictional writing I have ever had to pleasure to read: the chapters of “An Attack, and a Repulse,” “Snow,” “Highly Questionable,” “Hysterica Passio,” and the last 12 pages or so of “A Soldier, and Brave” could, with some minor alterations, stand by themselves as excellent short stories. Yet other parts of the book, where Mann through the characters of Settembrini and Naphta, presents the social and intellectual views of the world at the book’s point in time, seem to go on forever. I sometimes wonder if Mann’s editor had the courage to bring this up with the author, only to be overridden by Mann’s insistence that every word had to remain.

This is a very good book; but like all books, 'The Magic Mountain' has its flaws. If one is willing to invest the time and have great patience, one should be rewarded with reading a book that will keep you thinking about the book’s theme and characters for the rest of your life.

What begins as a slow, listless, ponderous novel soon becomes a stirring adventure of the senses. It is, in fact, the most deliciously sensous book I have ever read. Hans Castorp goes to the Berghf sanatorium in the Swiss mountains to visit his cousin, intending to stay only three weeks, but he ends up staying for seven years. Amidst death and disease, Castorp experiances a dizzying array of physical, spiritual and intellectual impressions, the effects of which all seem sublimated by the rarefied mountain air. The dominant theme is the nature of Time. The Berghof is hermetically sealed, as it were, from the outside world; its inhabitants live by a different clock, where even mundane routines - such as taking one's temperature - assume almost ritualistic proportions. To me, above all this is a novel of the senses, not just the physical senses, but also the "extra-senses" and "Time-sense". It even deals with senseless-ness, both in its inanimate material form and in the form of death. Even the intellectual convolutions of Naphta and Settembrini - one the rational humanist, the other the romantic terrorist - are intensely sensous in that they often leave the logical realm and take flight into a world that may be described as sense-ideas. To the reader, the very act of reading provides a sense of timelessness, of suspended animation in all the hustle-and-bustle of the real world. It is a book to be savoured slowly, for it draws you into its own pace, which is leisurely yet intense. Amidst the pristine whitness of the enchanted mountain, there is much color: the sky here is more intensely blue, the grass greener. The people here, all presumably so ordinary down there at the almost forgotten " flat-land", are here so extraordinarily human, for here they exhaust the limitless sense-possibilities of the human experiance on this earth. This is a most unusual novel, perhaps a one-of-a-kind experiance. It creeps under your skin and enters your bones and becomes, like your senses, part of your earthly existance.

It has been said that a classic is a work that everyone wants to have read, but which no one actually wants to read. Now, having read this novel, I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. I'm glad I read it, and was certainly thoroughly enlightened by its message and its incredible range of philosophical and intellectual topics, but I must admit that reading this book was a laborious process.

The story is set in a saniorium in the Swiss Alps. The institution serves as a microcosm of pre-World War I Europe, and the patients are representative of the various ruling classes which eventually brought about the conflict. Two opposing philosophies, the "Asiatic" and the "European," are represented in the persons of Settembrini and Naphta. The book's central revolves around this, the parody of European social structure before the great war.

Of course, there is much, much more to the book that just this. Everything from music to medicine is covered, and a great many intellectual debates are contained, spanning everything from monism and dualism to progress and the status quo. There is also a very extensive reference to time. In fact, Time seems to be a character of the novel, and a great deal of the book covers the way we perceive time and how it works in relation to us.

I loved this novel, and feel like it is certainly worth having read. As I said, however, it is a very difficult read (at least it was for me), and often I felt as if I were wading through material too deep for me to comprehend. Mann was a brilliant individual, and deserved the Nobel Prize he won for literature. This monumental work deserves to be called one of the `classics' of this century. It is difficult at times, yes, but it is also supremely rewarding.

To read this unbelievable work is to experience the fruition of one of the most enlightened minds in literary history. From the beautiful but intellectually minor Buddenbrooks to this impeccable piece of fiction, Thomas Mann grew as a thinker with staggering rapidity and thoroughness. The book reads like a bottomless bag of delicious morsels: no matter how many you pop in your mouth at one time, you never seem to get to the last one. "What a piece of work man is," Mann observes, "and how easily conscience betrays him. He listens to the voice of duty, and what he hears is the license of passion." The book teems with passages such as this, whose inarguable truth and sincerity transcends traditional value judgements. Northrop Frye writes that art is neither good nor bad, true nor false. That certainly applies to this book. If we are to believe that the great poem should not mean but be, then Mann's book is just as immortal a poem as it is a novel. But equally as delightful as its language and ideas (excitingly rendered into English by John E. Woods) are the book's actions and characters, which are drawn so vividly you could almost touch their faces, hear them breathing, dwell in their hearts until the book's final word. And the action: who would not want to take a ride up to that hermetic but wildly sociable world of the Swiss Alps sanatorium, which seethes with the lust and intellectual vigor of of an ancient Greek tragedy? The cast of individuals Hans Castorp meets during his stay there are unforgettable, and the dramatic pitch of their many quarrels and parties is indeed nothing short of "magic." This is a world you fall in love with and would die to step into. If any single passage in all of Mann's work won him the Nobel, it is the one this book concludes with: the matured and resolved Hans Castorp blending into the violent human sea of the battlefield in what would become World War I, that epic nightmare which Mann predicts with alarming detail and precision. Ultimately, I think this is a book about being human, one of the select few that do not settle for examining a particular aspect of the human experience, but the entire scope of it all. It is a book for everyone: the lonely, the loved, and the lost.

As sort of a running joke whenever an online reviewer begins their say on Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Mann's gargantuan symbolic pretext to WWI, they always begin by remarking how it's a novel about how Hans Castorp (who's best described as an ordinary German gentlemen) intends to go to a tuberculosis sanitarium for three weeks and ends up staying there for seven years- at which point the reviewer states that this is essentially the entire plot and it's a massive novel where nothing happens and, after many months effort, I must reluctantly concur that to paraphrase The Magic Mountain would be saying that it's a whole lot of nothing and that this is a novel that can only be enjoyed and understood on the most infintesmal detail; but don't be afraid dear reader! there is ne'er a word wasted and Thomas Mann's Olympian sarcasm, irony, and humor give the novel brisk- though full of philisophically bantering and sidetracked tedium- pace that keeps your interest hooked and pedagogically intoduces you to many prevailing modernist ideas via symbolic characters.

700 pages, loved every word of it, even if at times it did get a little dry and overly academic (namely the parts with Settembrini and Naphta). Ultimately- very funny, many quotable digressions on philosophy, colorful characters, magical prose, and difficult readability that's worth it in the end. Recommended for anyone who's intrigued by metaphysical fiction but doesn't know where to start.

"A+"

Probably more than any other author since Goethe, Thomas Mann wrote the quintessential "Bildungsroman" with The Magic Mountain. Like all of Mann's works, it is a sprawling monster of a novel, getting into just about everything under the sun from the first impression of hearing a phonograph (back when they really were new) all the way to the intellectual underpinnings of the counterreformation. Like most great writers, Mann can get into your interior life, and he will do so here in a way that will put you into the sanitarium with our hero Kastorp, and share his life and discoveries. It never ceases to amaze me how the thinnest of plots - none at all, in fact - can spin such a pure gold of a novel. I must confess that I prefer "Faustus", but after that this is my favorite Mann novel.
However, I will stick with H.T. Lowe-Porter's version over Mr. Woods'. Ms. Lowe-Porter had the advantage of a personal and professional relationship with Mann, and if Mann were writing in English (which he spoke passably, I believe) I think it would probably parallel her version more than Mr. Woods'.

"The Magic Mountain" might very well be my favorite book of all times. There might be other books which I enjoy equally, but there cannot be a book I value more than this one. And that although I did not have a good start with Thomas Mann. Indeed, I had to read his "Felix Krull" in highschool when still living in Germany. I hated it. Many of my friends had to read "Magic Mountain" instead, and they hated it as well and called it the most boring book of all times.

Years later, I still can understand this view. It might even happen that the book also bores you. Indeed, all that happens is that a young man comes to a Spa in the Alps, sleeps, eats and talks to people and nothing more, and that over a 1000 pages. Besides that, Thomas Mann writes like an old Latin teacher, his sentences are often a page long, and overly structured.

It just happened that the book really touched me. I don't even know why. Here are some reasons: First, German is not the most beautyful language. It is quite hard and quite complicated and has a harsh tone to it. But Thomas Mann really manages to turn the complicated structure into a virtue. He is one of the very few people who can handle german extremely well (one of the others being Kafka) and who manage to turn it into a beautiful language. I imagine that any good English translation can account for that.

Second, it adresses the major philosophical question everybody of us has. And these questions are timeless and do not seem to depend on the circumstances in which you are living. In that sense, the book is very apolitical (although it adresses European Politics at the beginning of the 20th century, but in a very "abstract" way).

Third, I have not read a book where character development and structure is better. Thomas Mann has such a deep understanding for his protagonists and his surroundings.

Fourth, I like the humanistic feel of the book. It certainly is "bourgoise", and for that the german hippie community hated Thomas Mann.

Well, you have to read it to understand what I mean, I can't describe it. Love it or hate it. I cannot imagine that in this case there is something in between (and normally I don't like saying that!).

What a sweeping novel. Really, I have never come across another book in which I felt I knew the main character quite so well as this one. We, the readers, as not spared one detail of Hans Castorp's 7 year soujorn into the Swiss Alps seeking treatment for a supposed case of TB. This novel, quite simply, encompasses all of early twientieth centery Europe. Bergohf, the santatorium where Hans stays, is, as the back of the book states, a microcosm of Europe. Ths you will find that all the characters represent some aspect of the European mindset in the early 1900's (right before World War I, mind you...). We are shown the major deabates of contenintal philosophy, the angry polemic of radicals and reactionaries alike. Our blank slate, Hans, is molded and shaped by this world away from reality, and we come to understand things about human nature, suffering, illness, and strife that simply wouldn't be illuminate otherwise. I did like this book. But in the end, I was finding it excessivley long. Many of the later episodes do not seem to give much to the plot and do not shed any new light on to Hans' character. So I recommend this book with reservations. The Good parts of it are REALLY good. But just be prepared for a long, occasionally frustrating read.

This book can be dense at times, but it's so worth reading it. In my opinion, it's one of the greatest literary works of all times. I read it for the first time in Spanish when I was a teenager in Cuba. I immediately became fascinated by the intense psychological dynamic among the characters and the profound intellectual discussions that unfold and drag on over a big part of the book. It's simply a masterpiece.

You can see a summary of the plot of the book in mostly every other review about this book. What I did not found was the fantastic way of the author to tell several stories in several levels at the same time. For the straight thinker, the story might be closer to a Seinfeld episode than a literary masterpiece... a story about nothing. Even at this basic (first line level), the book is worth reading, with every chapter narrating a different short story worth reading in itself like separate Seinfeld chapters, with some common characters and some new ones introduced in most of them. The author was nice enough to even explicitly reflect on some of his ideas about "time" at this level making even the most linear thinker reflect and grow about this interesting subject. For me, however, The "Magic" of the book comes when you start thinking about the layer underneath the first level, where Mann through the use of the different characters and what they represent study a variety of social subjects like freedom, eductation, politics, theology to name a few. Then there is (I believe) a third level layer about the dynamics of human maturity and how we came to be adults through the experimentation and openess to ideas of all sorts... picking the ones that resonates to us, and how ideologic movements look presicely to the impressionable youth to propagate their ideas.

I have to warn you that unfortunately I am just a systems engineer and not smart or educated enough to fully grasp all of the different ideas, metaphores and symbols in the book. It is evident the book has MUCH more to offer than what I was able to actually get, yet I really liked it. Probably why the author warns that in order to understand the book you will need to read it twice... in my case it may have to be a bit more times.

Like many in America today, I find myself a product of an unfinished education, with a sense of being flung into a history I don't quite grasp. I do my best to remedy my inadequacies, and a novel like this is an excellent tonic for them.
A classic 20th century novel of ideas, there's so much to mull over here: the nature of time, notions of progress and regress in history, the body and illness, psychoanalysis and spiritualism.
Unlike his contemporaries Joyce and Faulkner, Mann doesn't give us radical experiments in narrative form. This is fairly straightforward and readable. The only bit of cleverness is Mann's telescoping of narrative and chronological time: 1 week can take a hundred pages, while a few years can be covered in twenty. However, as Mann writes at the outset, only the exhaustive is truly interesting, and Mann seeks to be fascinating throughout the 700 pages.
Mann has a sense of humor and a sense of tragedy, and both shine here, with adults wrapped up like babies, medical X-ray photos as sensual mementos, multiple breakfasts, and grief as fetish. Despite the ironic and frequent declarations of the hero Hans Castorp's "mediocrity," by the end, Mann elicits from us genuine and deep sympathy for him.

Thomas Mann's opus follows Hans Castorp's visit to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a stay which would last seven years. This immensely rich and complex novel is, at its core, about temporality. We are given numerous conversations between the primary actors about the plasticity of time, about the ways in which our sense of time shape our existence. What is particularly brilliant about Mann's prose in 'The Magic Mountain,' is his ability to provoke sensations in the reader that mirror the protagonist. For instance, during the scene early in the novel where Castorp decides to stay at the sanatorium, I found that I too had been seduced by the private world which Castorp had become embedded. It is during this scene that it is revealed that the patients are in fact intoxicated (both literally and metaphorically) by their environment; the accretion of bacteria on the spinal cord creates the effect of a subtle intoxication and euphoria. Remarkably, Mann does not fail to create this effect through the creation of his conversations, which achieve an extraordinary level of verisimilitude. This is a novel about ideas, not actions. We are thrown into an ongoing dialectic between the enlightenment and romanticism, between the hard sciences and psychoanalysis, between philosophy and religion, and so on. The characters, particularly Castorp, Settembrini, and Dr. Krokowski, pulse with realistic energy. 'The Magic Mountain' is a masterpiece of form and scale, it is truly one of the great literary works of its time. John Woods has provided a supremely readable translation, both in the beauty of its cadences and in the rich subtlety of the dialog.

Nominally, the Magic Mountain is the story of Hans Castorp, a young German man who has just finished school and is about to start on a career in shipbuilding. First, he goes for three weeks to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his cousin, partly for a vacation before he starts his job and partly to convince his cousin, a soldier, that he should rejoin the real world rather than stay in the sanatorium. Castorp gets a check-up from the doctor, learns that he is ill and remains for seven years.
Mann originally started this book as a novella parody of sanatoriums and medicine in the early 20th Century, when doctors were first saying that disease was created by organisms and were enamored with the power of the newly discovered x-rays. However, Mann stopped the novella at the beginning of World War I, and came back to it at after the war, realizing that he had a lot to say and that this story might be a good vehicle through which to say it.
After all, the sanatorium's clientele were the new rich and the old upper class of all the different countries of Europe who began the war. The doctors acted both as the leaders who led them through the insanity and the scientists who made the mechanized, horrible war possible. And Hans Castorp was the age of the soldiers, following the leaders, the aristocracy, the scientists and the intellectuals into battle.
You can read all this into the book, if you wish. The doctors are firm in their belief that they are helping their patients, but are not above shenanigans like "proving" with little evidence that patients should stay year-round, rather than leave for the summer in order to line their wallets. Herr Settembrini and later Herr Nafta are the intellectuals filling Castorp with ideas that seem sometimes benign and sometimes diabolical. Castorp is a young, impressionable man who falls madly in love for a fellow patient, Clavdia, but has no outlet for his emotion, except during Carnival--a truly amazing scene, which alone is enough to make the book worthwhile. No wonder this continent was plunged into a tragic war that left Mann with the need to write this beautiful, tragic book.
I, however, was more interested in Mann's thoughts about of life in general that permeate this book. My favorite example is the way Mann talks about the concept of "getting used to getting used." He describes it in the sense of Castorp who never gets used to the thin air in the Alps and therefore always winds up redfaced and short of breath. However, Castorp does get used to always being redfaced and short of breath. Therefore, he gets used to getting used to the Alps.
This is what part of life is. We are unhappy with many parts of our life (maybe a job, maybe family, maybe friends or lack of friends, or financial resources) and we never get used to that. It leaves us with an empty feeling somewhere in our soul and no way to get rid of it. We never get used to this problem and thus the empty feeling never goes away. But we get used to the empty place in our soul and think of it only occasionally. But it is there crying out.
What a sad thought about life. The solution, of course, is to listen to the part that is crying out rather than squelching it and to try to do something about it. But it is often easier to get used to getting used to a situation than it is to fix the situation. It is easier for Castorp to stay in the mountains rather than breathing normally.
Overall, an excellent book, with ideas that I had never even come close to thinking of before.

This book could be classified as an adult substitute rendition of Animal Farm as the Berghof grows hostile. It is the story, written between the World Wars taking place in the run up to World War I of Hans Castorp, a young German with a future who makes a three week trip of visiting his cousin up in the Alps. The specific destination in the mountains is a sanitarium for those with tuberculosis. Given the time period the word tuberculosis is never used. Only the condition, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment are described in many scenarios where you finally say aaah tubular...tuberculosis. But all this is the back drop to Mann's exploration in to the perceptions of time and the rift between social science and religion. Castorp ends up staying in the sanitarium out of choice.

In the beginning of each chapter Mann puts forth a hypothesis on time in a novel narrative. The rest of the chapter is suggestive color commentary on the antics of people in a 1920's Sanitarium. I call this poetry in prose. This takes longer to tell the rest of the story, which is mildly intriguing at best, but engages the reader to examine his own philosophies. In the end time becomes secondary in conflict of the soul between that which is spiritual and that which is material to which all social problems are secondary of which this is the only kind of Individualism that can be constant.

Mann uses three characters to create the analysis of society. Setrmbrini, is an advocate of secular civic norms; Naphta, is an exiled not quite ordained Jesuit priest. Both pedagogs are introduced early in the book and provide on going debate to out wit the other to the benefit of Hans Castrup. Peepercorn arrives late to the sanitarium and is incoherent in his commanding communication who imparts a don't worry be happy final ruling on all. Mann himself author weighs-in on one position over the other in the voice of Hans Castrup who surmises "There are many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is the worst". Hans Castrop's many previous observations of the pedagogic debate between Setembrini and Naphta was contradictory in whole and on each person's part. Their clever wit was no better than Peeperkon's incoherent incomplete sentences. In the end personality prevails over intelligence in societies. It pains me to see too many examples of this phenomena being the reality.

The subject of time the ends up being an undercurrent in theme. I believe Mann suggests that the cosmos is infinite and therefore there exists no supersensible world, no dualism. In the voice of Naptha: "The Beyond is absorbed in to the Here, the antithesis between God and Nature falls, and man ceases to be the theater of struggle between two hostile principles and all becomes unitary and harmonious." And therefore without man, there is no time.

In my commented bibliography found by searching on the key word cigarroomofbooks, each note is categorized as either philosophical, or that to do with time, or both.

I've just been travelling for 2 months and decided to pack a ratty second copy of The Magic Mountain with me. A long 'didactic' novel, certainly enough sustenance for any journey. I managed to skim through most of the last half on a 10 hour train trip, so my impressions will be that of a tourist. A friend of mine who read it said it was a powerful work of philosophy. Having studied a certain amount of philosophy, I found certainly a whole wealth of philosophical, sociological and historical musings. But to my annoyance, none of the issues could really be developed into a strongly structured argument. Rather, I feel, Mann was trying to conjure up the intellectual milieu of the time. If anything, Mann, as artist was trying to describe the philosophy of the age from a point above philosophy, weaving a narrative of contradictory thoughts, if you will. I found the characters beautifully drawn and they rebounded off each perfectly. From the indolent, dreamy Hans to the intensely funny Settembri, as he pontificated what was basically an inarticulate philosophical position. The book was at its best in the heated discussions which cemented the foible and nuaced details of the characters. But...between these conversations, I found the prose rather lacklustre and pedestrian. Pages and pages of static descriptions of the sanitarium put me very close to catatonia, until I got woken up by the arrival of some characters. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the writings of some more contemporary writings, but couldn't the passage of time be evoked by ways other than the physical passing of time in the reading process itself? But let it be said, the coherence of the novel is staggering. The tightness of the structure is sustained over the course of this weighty novel. Now that is a feat to be admired.

Many cogent remarks have already been made on Mann and his Magic Mountain. I will not rehearse them here but simply add a few reflections based on my second reading of the book. First, the Woods translation, as others have remarked is significantly better than the one by Lowe-Porter. Upon rereading I reflect that the old French aphorism -plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose (The more things change the more they stay the same) is only true most of the time. Mann's mountain was masking a massive volcano that erupted in the twentieth century destroying the world he created. The descendants of Hans Castorp and his mountain top friends - if there are any- have been transmogrified into a cell phone Facebook crowd, twittering their confreres in the valley about the the sanatorium scene. A resurrected Mann would now have to considerably expand the Totentanz chapter in a revised edition and perhaps retitle the book as Dance Macabre.

To a great many Europeans, World War I must have seemed like Armageddon, a cataclysmic event that would completely and irrevocably transform the continent. Covering the time leading up to the war, "The Magic Mountain" personifies this transformation in its main character, a young man named Hans Castorp, whose life becomes immeasurably enriched after he abandons the ease and complacency of his childhood and opens his mind to new vistas of knowledge. It is not just the coming-of-age novel of a man, but of the world.
Hans is a moderately intelligent engineering student from Hamburg who grew up in an environment of comfort and leisure with not many thoughts about anything other than what concerns him directly. One summer, he goes to the Swiss Alps for three weeks to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is convalescing at a sanatorium called Berghof for people with respiratory ailments. While there, Hans takes ill as well and is forced to stay longer to recuperate, a stay which stretches itself out to seven years.
At the Berghof, Hans makes the acquaintance of several other patients of various intellectual and social levels. Most prominent is an Italian named Settembrini, a freelance writer, cynic, and progressivist who dreams of a world republic and believes literature is the ultimate unification of politics and humanism. His current work in focus is the contribution of a literature section to an encyclopedia on human suffering, the intent of which is to catalog all its causes and try to eliminate them. Settembrini has a nemesis in another off-site patient named Leo Naphta, a Jew-turned-Jesuit who advocates a sort of Christian communism, using St. Augustine's City of God as a model. These two have ongoing philosophical and theological debates, the effect of which is a battle for Hans's soul.
Hans gradually broadens his interests, indulging himself in biology, anatomy, botany, skiing, music, and the exploration of the ultimate scientific mystery, how life grew out of unlife. Other patients also occupy his time: Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman whose husband never enters the picture and who is the object of many affections at the Berghof; the malapropism-speaking Frau Stohr; Paravant, a mathematician who is trying to determine if pi is a rational number; Mynheer Peeperkorn, a wealthy Dutch epicure; and Ellen Brand, a girl with paranormal experiences.
Along with Jorge Luis Borges, Mann is arguably the most erudite writer of 20th Century fiction. I was consistently amazed at the depth and detail with which he could write about such a wide variety of subjects, from the sciences to the arts to politics. The novel expects its reader to be highly and thoroughly educated, but don't sweat the tough stuff; you can approach unfamiliar territory with the wide-eyed wonder of Hans and imbibe the ideas presented as food for thought and discussion.

I grabbed hold of this novel after I read that Susan Sontag read this aloud when she was an adolescent. Harold Bloom, the literar critic from Yale, said that this book requires considerable learning to read and understand. Having read all of it and understood most of it I feel pretty well.
The thrilling part of this novel is when Hans Castrop is educated into the ways of an intellectual life by his mentor Herr Settembrini. In the rarefied air of the mountain sanatorium the two debate art and literature. For an air-chair intellectual like myself it was fun to learn more about the humanities from the discourse of Herr Settembrini.
Like all of Mann's novels and short stories the prose is beautifully written. And as Susan Sontag points out "The Magic Mountain" includes it's own built in literary criticism to help you understand the plot and theme.
For a homosexual, Thomas Mann knows the heterosexual skill of seducing a female. When Hans Castorp was wooing Madame Chucat I had to look over my shoulder and see if anyone spied my embarrassment as I am sure I was blushing. This was such a beautiful narrative that I wanted to subject it to memory so I could use it in the future. (I have the same goal for some of Shakespeare's sonnets and soliloquoys.)
I am still a little confused by the ending. I won't ruin it for you but suffice it to say it is not clear to me which character was the subject of the final few paragraphs. Maybe someone can recommend an Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, or other informed criticism that I can read.

When my book club chose to read Magic Mountain, I had absolutely no idea what it was about. Being a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I guess my interpretation is a bit off the beaten track. After the first couple hundred pages, I thought that perhaps it was a "Haunted House" story, that the sanitorium was exerting some evil influence on the characters. It took me a while to figure out that it was really a fairy tale, one of those stories in which hapless mortals fall into a fairy ring and stay to dance the night away, and afterwards discover that a hundred years have passed in the real world.
Last month my whole family got the flu, and we were all in bed for almost a month. Just as with the folks encamped on Magic Mountain, time just seems to stand still as all attention is focused inward, and the real world and its responsibilities just seem to disappear.

I hesitate to think what would happen if Thomas Mann wrote the Magic Mountain today. Would his publisher ask him to shorten it by half? Would he be told by his agent -- were he fortunate enough to get one -- that the book could never sell unless he enlivens the plot? Truly, it would be simple enough to ridicule the book's simple plot, particularly given its length. But if anyone listened, they just might miss out on arguably the greatest philosophical novel ever written.

As intellectually stimulating as this book was, it was equalling gripping to the heart. That, of course, is the hallmark of a truly great novel of ideas. In a land of action movies and MTV for teenagers and 50+ hour work weeks for "college educated" adults, I wonder what percentage of our population would have either the time or the patience to savor this masterpiece. In fact, it might not be too bold to say that we can evaluate the level of education in a society by its ability to nurture the appreciation for works like this one. I feel blessed for being given the opportunity to read it.

I liked this book without understanding much why. I always wanted to read more and more. For one, I wanted to know when Mme. Chauchat would come back and what would happen :-) I also enjoyed the conversations between Settembrini, Hans and Joachim and later Nafta. The climax of Hans' revelation in the mountain is also nice. But so much is left unexplained... ********* SPOILERS AHEAD ********* Why did Nafta kill himself? Or Peeperkorn too? Why did Clavdia leave so suddenly to be never mentioned again (when she was quite central during a long part of the book)? ************ END OF SPOILERS *********** And what's the central point of the book? I see many disconnected facts. Maybe there isn't such a central point, but then why are all those facts in the same book? :-) I see people saying this is one of the very best books ever, and I wonder. Yes, it is good, but to be acclaimed like that it would have to have shown some essentially new insight, and I didn't see that. The discussion about Time is interesting, but that's far from a great original insight. ... .

I have been toting around with me a copy of TMM for about 25 years, ever since my English professor (and advisor) raved about it. (I can't remember the nunmber of times in which I've packed and unpacked it through numerous moves

But now I've read it and I'm quite happy that I have, which is not to say that I thought it was a joy to read either. It's really a curious book, fascinating at times, tedious at others, but still oddly compelling -- and irritating too!

A couple of reviewers have mentioned their irritation with the narration. I most definitely agree; it's pretty off-putting and overly mannered - at least for my tastes - but familiar for those used to reading pre-19th century literature.

The big issues: the nature of time, the impact of illness. Real debates about rationality v. the spiritual (via the nearly constant debates between Settembrini and Naphta). These are all pretty entertaining, but you'll be much happier with these parts if you're tolerant of pretty long-winded, complex philosophical debates. If not, beware...

Character development here is pretty weak IMHO, but in some sense that's almost an unfair or irrelevant criticism. Mann's characters are more useful as symbols of big ideas...and Hans himself is actually in that long tradition of the passive and mundane hero. It's what circulates around him that's interesting, not really he himself...That said, there doesn't seem to be a lot of "psychological truth" about Hans or many of the other characters.

Now as the father of a four-year-old, I admit I'm nearly always tired and the only time I really have to read is before falling asleep. So it should be no surprise to hear that it took me about four or five months to read this book...but believe it or not, it's actually, kind of readable! And I clearly liked it enough to stick with it for those five months. But I really would say that I'm pretty much in the middle about this book: interesting, tedious, and weirdly compelling. I'm quite happy that I read it - it doesn't feel as though it was a waste of my time - but I can't say that it feels as though it's changed my life either.

I am working on a book about Vikings and how they landed in Rhode Island. Their interbreeding with Narragansett Indians became evident when they were immune to TB because of the Viking exposure to the disease. As I write about TB and its resurfacing recently, I am reminded of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," which I read 40 years ago. On that mountain sanitarium, all the problems of Europe were debated by the patients and I came to understand the issues of that time. I will never forget the romances of Hans Castorp, the people he idolized, the debates over politics, the role of German opera and literature, the close touch with death as he skied alone and became sleepy, and the unbelievable ending. I will do as Mann suggested and read it again because I was transported to another world of the past by this genius. I believe that his "Death in Venice" is as masterful and beautiful a depiction of latent homosexuality as anyone has ever written. I, a former psychologist, know how well he portrayed this.

In this popular novel of the author, set almost entirely in a sanatorium for tuberculosis in Switzerland, is discussed everything that is life. All reflections about life are treated. It is a typical narrative of modernism, which enters a lot into the circumstances and thoughts of the characters. Every book lover should read the classics once in their life and this is one of them. But you have time to do it and have a clear mind. More than a reading is a study.

Having read most of Thomas Mann's works in English translation, I am of the opinion that he is the most brilliant man ever to become a well known novelist. In general, his books are hard to read. But, he puts more ideas and thoughts into one book than any other novelist I have read. The Magic Mountain brings before the reader, in one novel, the entire spectrum of European thought in the time preceding World War 1. I found the book very slow going. But when you have finished the book, you will be overwhelmed by the greatness of the book and of Thomas Mann's mind. If you want to read a book by him that is easy. try The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Highly enjoyable

Until recently, the English-reading world only knew Thomas Mann's magnificent rendering of European civilization on the eve of World War I, "The Magic Mountain," through H. T. Lowe-Porter's somewhat disjointed, idiosyncratic translation. Now, however, we have this new translation by John E. Woods that for the first time captures dialogue nuances, plot subtleties, and philosophical joyrides that German readers have relished all along. After reading this impressive Woods translation, it's easier to understand why Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Hans and Clavdia would be pleased to know their relationship has lost the artificial language restraints and constraints placed on it by Lowe-Porter and now blossoms passionately in the open under Woods's careful, exact rendering of German into English. If you only know the Berghof tubercular sanatorium and the lives of its denizens high in the Swiss Alps through the earlier translation, do yourself the great favor of reading this new one and discover "The Magic Mountain" all over again!

Hegel, Hume, Locke and Schopenhauer. If these name do not ring a bell, then don't bother with looking for the deeper meaning. The story line has promise of humanisms, but wallows quickly in its own philosophical debates. The pace, timing and structure of the story is set with deliberate accuracy. The main character's quick slap approach to life is demonstrated by very short chapters, which eventually increase in size as the character becomes entrenched on the Magic Mountian. A story on how to so throughly unplug yourself from society that you lose part of your identity and rely on emptiness.

Finished this book last night and still trying to digest all that Thomas Mann was trying to tell me. A book of many levels, some of which I remain only dimly aware of. At its most basic level a young man spends seven years in a health spa during which time his contacts with the inhabitants educate him in the forces which are tearing at europe such as liberal humanism, aesthic spirituality and the ever present human passion.
I am left with the feeling that Mann was himself struggling with the issues that he raised. That to him it was "the great confusion". He does not provide answers, but in Magic Mountain he provides many of the questions which we should be asking.

In this absolute masterwork, Mann tells us the story and the education -intellectual, emotional and spiritual- of young Hans Castorp. Recently graduated from his engineering studies at the university, and just about to begin working for a shipyard, Castorp travels to the Swiss Alps at Davos. He is supposed to spend there three weeks visiting his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is receiving treatment against tuberculosis in a high-mountain hospital. After the three original weeks, Castopr discovers he is "sick", and so he stays there seven years, the span of this magnificent "bildungsroman" or novel of apprenticeship and inner growth. It is never really clear if Castorp does get sick or if he gets trapped by the magical place.

Anyway, the isolated hospital is the perfect place for Mann to create this microcosmos of Europe and of life, a few years before that world came crumbling down forever in the suicidal WWI. In the Berghoff hospital, Castorp meets several people which will be, either through affinity or antagonism, his mentors. But first we have to mention the beautiful Russian Clawdia Chauchat, the one with the "steppenwolf-like eyes", a little older than Castorp, and with whom he falls in love -from a distance. Castorp will only have one chance of passionate love with her, before she temporarily leaves the hospital. The rest of their love will be only Platonic.

But Castorp meets other interesting and influential people. The most important one is Settembrini, an extremely sympathetic and attractive character. He is an Italian rationalist and liberal, who talks about progress, democracy, freedom, and the bright future of humankind, once it is set free from oppression and superstition. Settembrini embodies Western culture , faith in science, and progress, with a touch of naivete. Settembrini is sarcastic and straightforward, and a great creator of memorable sentences.

Halfway through the novel appears Settembrini's antagonist, his eternal (or almost) rival in heated debates. He is Naphta, a Jewish converted to Jesuit seminarist, who is a dangerous and terrorist radical. He embodies the spirit of the Middle Ages, mysticism and occultism. At the same time a religious fanatic and a Communist (after all, Communism is more a religion than a philosophy), Naphta hates all things bourgeois: family, business, democracy, science and freedom of thought. He proposes a world that is static and egalitarian, a mystic Communism ruled by the Church, and he states that the only way to reach that Utopia is through Terrorism. Settembrini's and Naphta's discussions, which have a prophetic ending, are of the utmost relevance for our time.

A third mentor appears, late in the book, in the form of the millionare Dutchman Peeperkorn. He is an old, vane an at the same time endearing man. He comes back with Clawdia when she returns from her European sojourn, as her lover. Even though he is his beloved's lover, Castorp develops a father-son relationship with this man. Peeperkorn represents the Dyonisiac impulse, the life of the flesh, the senses, and the self. Irritant and inarticulate, Peeperkorn teaches Castorp many things about life, until he makes a sad, honorable and admirable decision. I won't spoil the ending, but it makes for one of the best books ever written.

Anyone who reads this book, aside from his or her affinities, will come out of it a little or much wiser. Like in "Doktor Faustus" (which can be considered a philosophical sequel and which I have reviewed here in the store), Mann brilliantly explores a number of important subjects. The most important is Time, or rather, the passage of Time. What is Time? Can it be really measured? Is it its length the same for all of us, all the time? What is its relationship with Space? The hospital's isolation, as I said, is perfect to explore this subject. The other major subject is sickness and health, as well as the relationship between body and mind. And, of course, Society. Mann opposes the rational and liberal mentality to the mystic and spiritual.

Never boring -in spite of its seemingly dense themes-, and with a great sense of humor and of irony, this book can be read fastly and merrily, even though it is long. Character development is of the highest order, as well as the Alpine setting and the poetic quality of Mann's prose.

PS: Look out, near the end of the sixth part (there are seven), for a chapter called "Snow". It is magical and it could be a masterfull short story in its own merit.

What is the difference between learning and naiveté, original thought and stupidity, good and evil? What does it mean to find yourself in totally strange world where the time is still and disease is an every day occurrence, where snow is around 9 months out of 12, and where death is part of life? Hans Kastorpe is diagnosed with a light form of tuberculosis and has to spend over a year on mountain top in a health resort. The experience radically changes him. From a somewhat high minded bourgeois he turns into a thoughtful young man, studying sciences he never thought of studying before, thinking about life, philosophy and politics, arguing with his two highly educated friends, and wondering whether he will ever come back to the plain.
The book is uneven -- on its highs it takes one like an ocean wave and the words are being simply breathed in. On its lows it becomes a bit tedious, a bit wordy, a bit too philosophical. But overall a great work.

"My great complaint is that it is my fate to spend my malice upon such insignificant objects." - Settembrini

...and malice is the animating spirit of criticism. In that regard, I do hold malice toward particular aspects of this book. Specifically, Mann often feels obliged to bend our thoughts toward the inconsequential. For example, his unrelenting exposition of trivial details, such as the six courses of the five daily meals (i.e., 30 descriptions of food), is unfortunate albeit not without forgiveness. We may overlook these intermissions of nonsense in anticipation of what we can safely know is to come: a clarity of thought, about every ten pages, that causes the reader to pause, place the book down and scribble out notes, raining thoughts onto paper.

As I read this large volume, the character I looked forward to most, and who makes the book worthwhile, is Settembrini, the Italian cousin of young Hans Castorp, the 24-year old "hero". The book is worth the read if for no other reason than to "see" how Castorp and Settembrini dialogue. Without a doubt, the silver tongue of our Italian intellectual is delicious and his irreverence spectacularly refreshing, not in the extreme sense so common today; rather, a truly sincere and respectable blasphemy. Although the ideas presented aren't new - harkening to Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche - it is easy to see why this book has received acclaim for describing the world-view of "ideas" in place, and volatile, in the early 1900's.

A good book to read with a good deal of patience, granting yourself prenuptial forgiveness for being impatient with its verbosity.

I won't summarize anything here... it's been done in these reviews already... but I've just finished the book and found it to be one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life. I can see that this book isn't for everyone...it does require a great deal of patience...there are lots of long, slow moving passages... but it isn't haphazard in it's unfolding. I just feel as though I've been in the presence of a master here, an author who guided me quite expertly through his created world. I found the characters fully developed, the story rich in detail, landscape, thought, idea, and purpose. It did take me a LONG time to read, but it was worth every second. I rank this among my favorite books, one of the most important books I've read, and one of the most rewarding.

After being blown away by the perfection of Thomas Mann's short novels A DEATH IN VENICE and TONIO KRUEGER,and after reading all the glowing reviews of this book I was fully expecting the reading of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN to be on the same level of enjoyment and intellectual stimulation as I experienced while reading Joyce's ULYSSES or Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY. The book started out well and had some gorgeous passages, but after about 250 pages I found myself wanting to skip sections and skip more sections and ultimately came to the conclusion that I found the book to be Wagnerian in it's length and development without sustaining my interest or drawing me into the characters. It dragged on and on and I decided that the time I would expend reading the remaining 550 pages could be spent better on some other reading. I am willing to grant that a German reading this book in his own tongue and with the typical German love of exhaustive exploration of subjects could well react to this book with the same resonance with which I feel when reading Faulkner, Proust or Joyce; but for me, I found that after getting very deep into the novel and scanning the rest of the text that THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN in this translation into English was a let down. I must also qualify my judgement of this book in saying that I prefer the audio book format and like to use good books on literary criticism which help illuminate the texts of great literature, neither of which were available for THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN to the best of my knowledge.

There is a whole body of reviews of this book under other editions, but I read this edition so have posted it here. This is a classic, but probably only appeals to a narrow readership, mostly academics. Hans Castorp goes from college to visiting a cousin in a tuberculosis clinic in the Swiss Alps for three weeks. Before the three weeks are up he becomes a patient. He has an independent income sufficient to keep him there indefinitely, or at least until the economic structure of Europe prior to WWI changes, which it does before the book ends. He stays there seven years; long enough for Mann to explore all the subjects he is interested in exploring. The book has very little action, with the exception of when an alcoholic with a lot of money arrives to liven things up, before he dies. The only part of the book I truly enjoyed was when Hans took up skiing. Unfortunately, this episode is nothing but a vehicle for Mann to explore certain psychological phenomenon that interest him. Once he does that, it is dropped. Hans doesn’t seem to be a real person, just a puppet for Mann. My biggest frustration with this book is that conversations in French are not translated. This was particularly frustrating when Hans has his big showdown with Clavdia. It seems to be an industry standard to do this, but I think it is nothing but intellectual snobbery. If I buy a book in English I expect to be able to read the whole thing. If the book was directed at a European audience, where most readers that would read a book like this are multi-lingual, that would be different, but this is directed at American audiences.

J.B. Priestley (1894-1984), the British novelist, playwright, and critic, declared >>The Magic Mountain<< "a novel of marvellous solidity, richness, complexity." Yes...this is one of the most profound and cerebrally provocative literary works of the modern era. Ostensibly a protracted experience at a Swiss alpine sanitarium, the novel as a whole is an enduring symbol of humanity in a pathological universe. Like other great novelists (such as Proust and Joyce) of the 20th cent., Mann was fairly obsessed with Time. Indeed, <<Magic Mtn.>> brings into striking juxtaposition the clockless time of the convalescent institution (where life is a seemingly endless succession of days) and the time-sense of the goal-directed world. The centralized point of view which prevails throughout the book is that of Hans Castorp and his expanding consciousness. By the end of the story, when Castorp has returned to "flatland," he has become a far wiser and more internally developed man than he could ever likely have become if he had lived a merely "horizontal" existence amongst general society. He achieved maturity through suffering, awareness, and confrontation of the Real. <<The Magic Mtn.>> is a great "developmental" novel but also a classical Germanic novel of education in the most beneficial sense of the term. Indisputably one of the seminal literary creations of the past century. I strongly recommend that you purchase/read the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation -- not the John E. Woods version.

I enjoyed the beginning of this novel - and have enjoyed other Mann works -
but by page 150 the ever-recurring descriptions of scenery, clothing, superficial
views of unpleasant people, combined with the endless paragraphs, the stodgy prose of the Lowe-
Porter translation, the repulsiveness of so many characters - I started finding
it as hard to breath as some of the most sickly members of this sanatorium for
tubercular patients.

And one can only wonder at the value of reading page
after page of obsolete 1900s science - and the constant repetition of their main ideas by
the philosophizing personae. For example, Settembrini is supposed to represent the values
of humanism, but he makes only the most shallow, sloganistic statements, and repeats them
at each appearance. All the characters are two-dimensional, with usually a couple of bizarre
traits added to their description, the only attempt to give the characters any personality.
It seemed to me like a puppet show of ideas: here is the humanist puppet, the materialist puppet,
the totalitarian puppet, etc.

I stopped reading by page 200, read some of the 5 star reviews here, so tried it again -
only to find I couldn't wait another 500 pages to escape from this stifling sanatorium
filled with two-dimensional freaks who do and say the same things over and over
and over.... One has to say that there is something compelling about the book, it is hard to put down - but
after a while, I just had to escape to writers who have some enjoyment of life, and of people,
before I as the patients herein lost the ability to breath.

Honestly, I had never heard of The Magic Mountain until reading an the store review of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, although I had enjoyed Mann's short stories as well as other German lit. These reviews of M.M. so consistently emphasized its insipid nature that I took the challenge upon myself and I am now, a week later, more than halfway finished. I disagree with the complaints of boredom because I personally have been intrigued by Mann's treatment of human nature and, to beat a dead horse, time. Mann's character development is remarkable and I find myself anticipating Settembrini's next lesson.

This book is not a good choice for fans of pop fiction, nor was it intended to be. However, anyone who appreciates classic literature and/or philosophy would most likely find reading this to be a pleasant and surprising experience, much like I have.

I finally managed to read the complete book, after several attempts, many years ago and the different interpretations others have made has always puzzled me. Something like Kaffka - no one knows what he is talking about - not really, but the desire to know never stops......

If you want to read a good book by Thomas Mann, read Buddenbrooks......I have read it three times, once in German, once in English and once parallel. So many years ago.....I would read it again, but I might spoil the dream . Meantime, keep a check on other interpretations of the Magic Mountain -someone is bound to agree with your idea, given time!!! It is a talking point, even in other countries - amazing!

One thing about the Magic Mountain is it never lets one go. I was upset in the beginning by the vividness of his descriptions - he is a powerful writer, and I was young, but once I had settled down to it, I didn`t find it a tedious task and I am glad I read it.

I've read the "The Magic Mountain" (or, going by its original name, "Der Zauberberg") at least three times. Yet, there are many parts in it that have still remained inaccessible to me - it is just too big a tome. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Thomas Mann tried here to tackle three major areas: the nature of time, the philosophy of The Enlightenment versus dogmatic faith in religious and political doctrines, and of course the big one, love.

Each of these themes would have easily deserved a novel in itself, but Mann never seems to have shrunk from a literary challenge. In fact, similar to one of the book's protagonists, Ludovico Settembrini, Mann seems always ready to show off his vast knowledge of philosophy, natural sciences, and historical events (to me, the only shortcoming of this work). But it's also evident that Mann perceived those issues as being of most importance in a world bent on crossing swords at least over some of these issues - in a man-made violent cataclysm known as World War I.

The main idea I've tucked away from this book concerns the ever-changing nature and concept of time. We know that our being is ephemeral; to paraphrase one of the most entertaining characters "Hofrat Behrens" (second only to the elephantine, yet tragic, character of "Mynheer Peeperkorn"), "we come from darkness and we go into darkness". And there's the time between our coming and going that, somehow, demands to be filled out. With elegance and a good dose of occasional irony, Mann shows how we as humans strive (or, occasionally, not strive) and/or struggle to do this, letting the characters develop in this setting at (literally) the top of the world.

Hans Castorp, whose life at Berghof we mainly observe, seems to be a creature of comfort, enjoying the many amenities and the ordered life in this institution. But with time he also aspires to something higher. He seeks out Settembrini's company to learn. He also begins to study anatomy (having been cued by the physical features of one "Clawdia Chauchat"), takes magnanimous care for the terminal cases among the fellow patients, and he faithfully (and perhaps fatefully) carries a torch for his one true love, "Clawdia".

However, with plenty of spare, and somewhat empty, time at ones disposal, time itself becomes a strange beast - interminably long in the present when filled with monotony and boredom, yet short and unyielding when later recalled from memory. What's more, time becomes stale, a burden, even threatening to the mind, breeding unrest and the zest for cheap and undignified entertainment. This book truly gets to the core of the question as to what defines our humanity, whether or how we one day might become less encumbered in this world. A world in which conflicts seem sometimes to spring out of the breeding ground of complacency and indolence. Mann doesn't provide answers to this. Rather, he poses a beautiful question at the very end - a question never fully to be answered, yet powerful in its allusion, seeking to probe the motivations behind our wishes and desires in and from this world.

I loved/hated this book! Maybe because I don't consider myself an "intellectual" - simply a lover of good stories. It was a wonderful premise for a story and a fascinating glimpse into life in a TB sanitorium - but I found myself wanting to quit reading several times whenever I'd be confronted by one of the intellectual ramblings (which could last for pages and pages) which I struggled to understand. The basic story was a good one - and finally towards the end of the book I relaxed a little and allowed myself to skip over these pages and enjoyed the book more without the frustration of plowing through incomprehensible text.

I discovered this jewel last year: I read a 1934 edition that belonged to my grandfather.Mann's style in writting is absolutely flawles. It might be dense to some people, but this kind of writting is not seen very much nowadays.

Hans Castorp pays a visit to His cousin in this Hospital up in the mountains. He is very bored at first with the idea, but he ends up staying there for a very long time.That clinic is an entirely different universe of its own, filled with strange characters. Hans falls in love with this russian woman named Claudia Chauchat.

Each character is representative of the thinkings of their time.The ending gives a pessimistic view of the future, right before World War I.

"Writters" like Anner Rice, Stephen King, and J.K Rowling could certainly learn a lesson or two from Thomas Mann.

No doubt inspired by Greek literature and philosophy, The Magic Mountain reads must like Platonic dialogues. Each character is a representation of an idea or point of view. The long debates, monologues, and dialogues are not there to advance the story, but rather express theories prevalent in Europe prior to WW1. Many of these debates are timeless and go on today as they did since the birth of theoretical thought.

Perception of time, materialism vs. idealism, liberalism vs. conservatism, love, lust, and logic are some of the vast discussions taking up in depth by Mann through his characters.

The Magic Mountain is an intensely important work for anybody with the patience and endurance to wade through its many dense pages.

At the end there is a piece on the making of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. The author spent three weeks at Davos in 1912 visiting his wife who was undergoing treatment for a lung condition. The Berghof was a pre-war phenomenon. It permitted parallel existence. THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN was supposed to be a companion to "Death in Venice" and a satire in juxtaposition to the above-noted long short story.

Hans Castorp, a young engineer, travels from Hamburg to Davos to visit his cousin. The visit is to be of three weeks duration. Castorp is supposed to commence to work for a firm of ship-builders. Joachim Ziemssen, the cousin, tells Castorp about the elongation of time at the International Sanatorium Berghof.

Early in the novel Castorp meets Settembrini, a humanist. He suggests that Castorp is like Odysseus in the kingdom of shades. At first Castorp is a disinterested spectator. There are five meals daily, but little opportunity to socialize in conventional ways except with those seated at the same assigned table. Hans Castorp wants to know about one Clavdia Chauchat.

At the end of three weeks stay it is determined that Hans Castorp has a moist spot on one of his lungs. After a period of bed rest, he resumes the regulated life at Berghof. It is no wonder that Mann first conceives of this work as a short story, a comic twin of his tragic "Death in Venice", because a group of people sitting about waiting to be cured is hardly a picture of dynamic life.

Just as Voltaire challenged the reality of the Lisbon Earthquake, Settembrini urges Hans Castorp to resist his diagnosis. The message imparted is do not accept it. Castorp is mystified. Pretty soon it is winter, the real season in the mountains. Castorp pursues a self-prescribed education in biology.

It is Christmas and the cousins receive packages. The cousins send flowers to a dying girl to counter the prevailing egotism of the Berghof and assume a sort of social work function for the other inmates. In the village they meet Naphta, a fellow lodger of Settembrini. The latter has an aversion to a piece of Gothic art possessed by Naphta.

During the second winter Hans Castorp obtains skis. Castorp remains at the Berghof for seven years. Settembrini attempt a duel, but Settembrini refuses, and Naphta kills himself. And then there is World War I.

This is absolutely beyond being a masterpiece. An exercise of reading it again and again would not be a case of time misused. Bravo.

Hans Castorp, een jonge kerel die op zoek is naar iets, maar nog niet precies weet wat, besluit in het sanatorium te blijven waar hij oorspronkelijk alleen maar zijn neef ging opzoeken. Zijn 7-jaar lange verblijf biedt de lezer een zicht op de Europese geschiedenis en vormt tevens ook een parodie op die geschiedenis. Met allerlei karakters die ver uiteenlopen en soms ook vervaarlijk dicht in elkaars buurt komen, zal hij uiteindelijk als volwassen uit het boek komen. En breekt WOI uit natuurlijk ...

It takes a hundred pages or so to get into this book, but once you do it is exceptionally rewarding. It made me feel as if I spent years in that sanitarium myself, and have intimate knowledge of the daily routine down to the lunch menu.

My favorite part is the strange class system that develops at the sanitarium, where at the top of the pyramid we have the sickest patients, those who have only months to live, followed by those who have terminal illnesses but are not close to death yet. At the bottom of the social structure there are those, like the protagonist, who have minor ailments that are not life threatening. Such patients are merely tolerated there.

There are a lot of philosophical dialogs in this novel, many a little too long but they are thought provoking and not uninteresting. Then of course, there is the inevitable rendezvous with history as we approach World War I.

This is one of my all time favorites, and the #1 on my list of books to bring with me to the beach, a resort spa, or the hospital: all go very well with the overall atmosphere of the book.

An annoying translation of a great book. The translator repeatedly uses words and phrases that are meaningless in English, such as "playing king", which in other translation is rendered "taking stock". Would you have been able to guess the meaning? On the other hand, a few passages are done with exquisite beauty. The evident care taken in the few marvelously written passages makes me think the translator was being lazy the rest of the time.

than the one by Lowe-Porter. Woods retains the magic. Initially, in a bookstore, I compared the two translations' respective first 3 paragraphs and found one read more like the minutes of a business meeting with better flow, while the other was more dense with description, more clunky with short sentences but richer in imagery and far more engaging. In my mind I labelled the former "garbage" and assumed it was the more recent translation. To my surprise the superior one was by Woods!

I was at first very intimidated by this book, but I like challenges so I decided to tough it out and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was really enjoying it. The debates about progress and religon were very enlightening, as also were Mann's theories about time and space. You must read this book two times though to really get the full benefit of it, I've only read it once but I plan to read it again in the near future.

I don't know where Vintage International gets off blazoning the cover with the words: "A New Translation . . . by John E. Woods". Sheesh.

Woods's translation is not new, folks, at least not to Vintage International. It first came out in 1996 and they used it then in a slightly different edition.

Yes, it is EXACTLY the same translation of the previous Vintage International edition of "The Magic Mountain," which you may have seen in its previous incarnation: it had exactly the same weight and size as this does but a bluish cover. It has not been revised or amended or anything.

I'm not saying Woods's is a bad translation or anything; it's just that it seems like with this slick new cover the folks at Vintage International are trying to get us Mann aficionados all in a bother by letting on like they have replaced some old stuffy translation [which saddled their older bluish edition] with this exciting new one, which you can obtain if you only purchase this new golden edition!

Malarkey. They're both the same John E. Woods translation.

Just for clarification: the previous translation used by Vintage was the Lowe-Porter job (last issued by Vintage in 1992), which by now has come to be universally regarded as inferior to Woods's 1996 production, even though the author, Mann himself, assisted Lowe-Porter on some translations (including "Der Zauberberg") before Mann's death in 1955.

Anyhow. You're always safe with Woods.

Sorry. Guess this wasn't a "quick note" after all.

This book was difficult to read. It certainly is not a page turner like any Harry Potter book. However, it is rewarding if you are patient.
It is about a young engineer, Hans, who ends up at a sanatorium. The details of the surroundings and characters are very detailed. He meets interesting characters from all over the world. The story lends itself to corcucopia of philosophical discussions and deep soul searching.
While I can not see real people debate like Settembrini and Naphta did, I learned a great deal from the depth of their knowledge and their passion for what they believed in and why.
Hans was no hero, but I still wanted to know what happened to him. I had a problem with the Ellen Brand sessions. I would have preferred some romance instead.

I was 15 years old when I read Mann's 'Magic Mountain' for the first time. And have gone back to it (or at least re-read certain passages of it) uncounted times since. Years ago I decided it would be the one book to take to the infamous deserted island with me if I had to pick only one book. And although the reasons for this choice have changed since, the choice itself hasn't. Why? Because with 'Magic Mountain' Mann has compiled a huge amount of information (and controversial information, for that matter) and an ecclectic variety of subjects: Mathematics, Medicine, Astronomy, Physics, Politics, Astrology, Psychology, Literature, History, Theatre, you name it. Thus, the story line - actually quite thin and simplistic itself - is merely serving as a bracket to hold this immense collections of man's opinions and knowledge together; and thus, btw, the opinion of one of the the store.com reviewers saying that the novel is BORING is rendered completely irrelevant --- boring it can only be to somebody who has no interest whatsoever in Modern Man, his failures and his praises. When I moved from Germany to California, I bought a second edition of the book, in English, in addition to my German one --- because the German one was simply so used that it had started to fall apart...

I read this book about ten years ago when I was 21. Mann, Dostoevsky and some other writers of the late 19th and early 20th century posses a singular gift for rendering all that is drab and uninspiring interesting and even original. Mann's keenness as an observer strips the lives of his characters free of all pretense. Each of the characters is endowed with a rich personality, and, at least I think so, we come to see them all as our fellows in life's struggles. What is particularly noticeable is the nearly incomparable expressiveness of Mann's writing. This is definitely the work of a writer at the very peak of his powers as a builder of worlds. In this case, the world is an isolated sanatorium where people, whether there to die or simply to prove that their wealth knows no modesty, enjoy a sort of respite from all the humdrum demands of daily life. Here, in this fragile and moribund world, Mann's characters are free to step out of their customary roles and see whether a different life could agree with them more. Read this book if you want to experience a different world rather than read some words on a piece of paper.

I owe Harold Bloom (from his book How to Read and Why) many thanks for turning me onto The Magic Mountain. I am finding that I love the elegaic prose of Mann's work even more than Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago (and that is saying a lot!). I relish Zhivago's seclusion and haven in the Urals but I am actually envious of Hans Castorp's retreat into the Swiss Alps. If only there could be such a place--a secluded haven for quiet learning, comtemplation and Eros. I know this is a place where people go to die, but it is the quiet life of The Magic Mountain that stirs my emotions. I can hardly wait to finish this, and continue on with other Mann works especially Death in Venice. I can hardly believe the works of Mann have eluded me for so long. But recently discovering The Magic Mountain has been like finding not only a precious gem, but a retreat unto itself; i am able to forget about all the cares and stress of work and have Mann's words massage my mind and spirit word by slow word...

I would highly recommend buying the woods translation instead of the Lowe-Porter translation. Half way through this book there is a very important several page scene in French. Lowe-Porter does not translate it to English! I did not finish the book, and purchased the Woods version which I enjoyed immensely. That scene was extremely important!

I only wish I had purchased the Woods version in the first place so I would have enjoyed the entire book instead of just the second half!

Thomas Mann is one of those writers that I want to like because I know I am supposed to, but at the end of the day, despite a valiant effort, we are not really friends, only friendly acquaintances. The Magic Mountain is the story of a young man, Hans Castorp, who goes to a a mountain convalescent community and takes a cure which we and he are not certain he really needs. His motivations seem to be in equal parts, one part flight from his uncle's business, and one part convalescence from a disease that might or might not be tuberculosis. This vacation among the sick, however, is entangling, and soon Mr. Castorp is told and he accepts (though we are not certain he believes it) that he must stay. We share Mr. Castorp's world and meet more of the patients and doctors, we learn that Mr. Castorp is not the only person whose motives are unclear, we begin to doubt the doctors, the other patients, and eventually-as the story moves into a more allegorical sphere-even the existence of the convalescent community in which the story takes place. I like the book. I'm not sure it deserves the critical acclaim it enjoyed when it was published. Perhaps I would like it more if I were more certain of its historical context.

Yes, the Magic Mountain is a dense read but well worth it. Mann delves deep into the psychological aspects of his characters to create profound understanding of each. I felt very well acquainted with the charachters like Frau Stoer, the Hofrat, Mm Chauchat, and of course, Hans Castorp. Not all have the same vocabulary as we do today but it's easy to relate these characters to similar people I have met in my lifetime.

The metaphors are not so well hidden that one cannot extract their meaning with a little effort. I sum this book up as an effort to convey to people to examine themselves where personal balance and understanding leads to good health physically and mentally. And that personal success is the beginning of the path to freedom and salvation. That is what I personally felt more so than the relationship to Europe pre WWI.

Do yourself a favor though and get the modern edition by Woods. The earlier Howells edition requires an arcaic english dictionary to wade through it.

Even if it seems to be classic and old-fashioned
this book reveals a very sensitive view of life
and an intimate insight in the time of the author
by a very detailed and adoring description of the
main actors feelings and thoughts.
This is definitely one of the books to take to
a lonely island.

The writing is brilliant, particularly the author's reflections on time. It's a book written to create an effect though, not to tell a story. After the first several hundred pages, I gave up waiting for something to happen. It's a good book, but it didn't suit me.

Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg was my introduction to the finest of literature, the kind to which too few of us have ever been introduced. For months, I found myself completely absorbed in the world of Hans Castorp. I lingered through this novel, never truly wanting to reach the end, knowing how difficult it would be to find comparable reading material. Although I have not yet read a translation of the few pages written in french, at the time I read it, I found myself effortlessly moving through the story as if I'd been viewing english subtitles in a foreign movie. Thomas Mann is the kind of author who makes you yearn for his writing over and over again, and Der Zauberberg is the perfect introduction to his many works.

Maybe I'm just too dumb to appreciate it's subtlety and complex themes, and I'm sure there's a lot that I'm "not getting", but I honestly feel that this is one of the dullest, most pretentious, most uninvolving books I've read.
I had actually looked forward to reading Thomas Mann's bloated opus "The Magic Mountain" for some time prior to finally checking it out of my school library; and yet I was extremely disappointed to find that more than half of it consisted of esoteric and incomprehensible conversations between the characters, with little plot or character development. Yes, yes, I understand that the characters supposedly constitute some kind of big metaphor for the major countries of Europe; but I don't give a [...], I just absolutely hated this book. I still don't know how I managed to wade through all 800+ pages of it.
So unless you're a very patient and motivated reader (I usually am) who can contemplate every nuance of a novel without having your patience tried, don't bother with this one, because chances are it'll leave you sleepy and more than a little puzzled.

p.s Hmmm...having finished this review, I feel compelled to re-evaluate my statements...sure, as I was reading "The Magic Mountain" I couldn't help feeling that, while somewhat intellectually stimulating, it was a little boring...and yet, somehow, when you're finished with it, it has left a curious impact on you...odd.

Hans Castorp, a young, newly qualified engineer arrives at the Berghof, a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps, in order to visit his cousin Joachim, a patient in that institution. Hans intends to spend only three weeks there before returning to his home in Hamburg to take up a position with his family's shipbuilding firm. During his stay, however, Hans is himself diagnosed with tuberculosis and is admitted as a patient. He eventually stays in the sanatorium for seven years.

Although there are some genuinely serious cases, many of the patients, including Hans himself, are not seriously ill. Their most pressing concern is how to occupy their time; lacking any productive employment they have to find various pastimes. One of the favourites is engaging in philosophical debate; much of the book is taken up with the details of Hans's conversations with two men with radically differing views, Ludovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. Settembrini is a man of the Enlightenment, a free-thinking liberal republican. Naphta, by contrast, despises the Enlightenment and all it stands for, advocating an ideology that combines obscurantist Catholicism with Communism. That mixture is perhaps less strange than it sounds; Mann perceptively realised that Communism, despite Marx's insistence that it was a materialistic philosophy, had by the early twentieth century started to take on many of the characteristics of an exclusivist religious sect.

Hans is a largely passive young man; he listens avidly to the debates between Naphta and Settembrini but takes little part in them. There are hints that his lengthy stay in the sanatorium may owe more to his passive nature than to any genuine illness, as he prefers the gentle, if uneventful, routine of the Berghof to the more active life he would lead if he were to return to his family business. There is perhaps also a suggestion of collusion between him and his doctors, who have a financial incentive to diagnose patients as being ill and in need of treatment on dubious grounds. Although Hans finds hobbies such as botany and skiing to occupy himself, his one great passion is his love for a fellow-patient, Clavdia Chauchat, a married Russian woman. Clavdia's main attraction for Hans seems to be that she reminds him of another boy on whom he had a brief homosexual crush during his schooldays. Hans's passion for Clavdia, however, (like his earlier one for his schoolmate) is fated to remain largely platonic; indeed, for much of the time he does not even speak to her. Another important character is Clavdia's lover, Pieter Peeperkorn, only introduced near the end of the novel. He is presented as a Dionysian figure, determined to enjoy life's sensual pleasures to the full, as opposed to the more Apollonian, intellectual figures of Settembrini and Naphta.

The novel is set in the years immediately preceding the First World War, and one theory that I have heard is that the sanatorium is a microcosm of Europe during those years and that the sickness of its inhabitants is symbolic of the moral and political sickness that led to the war. Although the patients are indeed drawn from various European countries, and although there would have been an obvious temptation for anyone writing from the viewpoint of the 1920s (as Mann was) to analyse the Edwardian era in that way, I did not find the book to be a political work of that sort. It is a "novel of ideas", but only in the sense that ideas are endlessly debated between the characters. Settembrini and Naphta put forward their ideas about politics, but no attempt is made to tie these in with the wider European political situation or, indeed, any aspect of life on the "flat land", as the sanatorium's inmates refer to the world outside.

This was, I felt, the novel's major weakness. I have always been of the opinion that novels of ideas, particularly political ideas, should exemplify the points under discussion by reference to the plot or to the situation in which the characters find themselves, but here there is little plot in the conventional sense. (To my mind, "Dr Zhivago", for example, is a much better political novel than "The Magic Mountain".) Like the Swiss mountain air, the atmosphere of the book is too rarefied. Ideas are discussed, but in a vacuum away from the real world. Politics is not something that affects people's lives, but rather a set of abstract propositions for discussion among a group of acquaintances intent on putting to rights a world from which they have withdrawn. Clergymen are sometimes said to preach from a pulpit six feet above criticism; Mann's characters seem to be preaching six thousand feet above reality.

Other ideas are discussed in a similarly detached way. There is, for example, much talk of love, but few of the characters, with the exception of Peeperkorn, have any serious romantic interest in their lives. Even Hans and Clavdia only seem to be playing at love. Mann has some interesting theories about the subjective nature of time, but it is difficult to make these into the basis for a lengthy seven hundred page novel. Mann was a highly gifted writer (I have greatly enjoyed the other works of his that I have read, such as "Buddenbrooks", "Death in Venice" and "The Confessions of the Confidence Trickster Felix Krull), but "The Magic Mountain", which always seemed rather cold and unreal, was something of a disappointment to me

It is almost pointless to assess a star rating to a book like this - a novel that breaks most of the conventions of the genre. I am a fan of Thomas Mann - I love Death in Venice and his short stories. This book however, taxed my abilities as a reader to the limit. It took me about two months to finish it. I don't pretend to have absorbed everything in it. It is an 854-page philosophical novel without any real plot.

It tells the story of Hans Castorp - an average Joe from Germany - who goes to visit his cousin in a health spa for three weeks and ends up staying for seven years. The trip isn't so much a vacation for him but a period of intellectual development - sort of like going to college. The bulk of the book is taken up with philosophical discussions with the humanist Settembrini and the radical Naptha. In all this, it is very difficult to tell where Mann's sympathies lie.

One of the joys of reading Mann is that his sentences evoke a Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. This however, wears thin over 800 pages. As A.S. Byatt points out in her wonderful introduction, one tries to hurry along but the novel demands to be read at its own speed. At the end of the novel, there is the fear that you missed something and didn't get everything out of it. Mann's advice was to simply read it twice. John Irving loves the book and claims to have read it more times than he can count. I may read it again - but not for a long time.

The the store blurb states the translation is by H.T. Lowe- Porter and John Woods- but that's misleading- it is only by John Woods.
I did not look at the book cover when ordering a replacement for my much-read, badly treated hardcover translation by HTLP, the original translator.
At times, she is unwieldy and archaic, but Woods is charmless in comparison. Well, now I have both sitting side by side....

If you can find an old second hand version, the first translation is, to my mind, much more evocative.

Probably the best novel I've ever read, Mann seems to consciously (maybe unconsciously, I'll never know) shape a monumental novel in such a way that you just wonder ... how he did it?! I didn't know until page 350 what was the intention of Mann, the sense he wanted to impart upon us. Until everything started to fit into what I call a the roundest, fullest, most complex, best structured novel he ever made. So rational, sensual, mathematical ... lushiously contradictory! Time for Mann

I will pass along a favor given to me: if you enjoyed "Magic Mountain," another fascinating book you will love is Glenn Kleier's "The Last Day." It is unquestionably one of the finest novels I've ever read. Enjoy! Elaine C.

John E. Woods' translation is amazing. The Lowe-Porter translations of all of Mann's books are plodding. They also shy away from his interest in things which might have been judged purient in the 1930's-1950's. Mann's deeply hidden homoeroticism is much more on the surface in Woods' great work. I only wish Woods would translate Death in Venice and Joseph and His Brothers

Sometimes I regret my resolve to finish every book that I begin reading. This one was a mistake, because my previous tussles with Thomas Mann (Death in Venice, Confessions of Felix Krull, Doctor Faustus) had all ended badly too. I've enjoyed none of his books that I've read and found them all a slog after the opening 100 pages, so this -- one of his longest and perhaps most difficult novel of all -- should have stayed on the shelf. I dare say that it's all my fault, that the teutonic manner simply doesn't agree with me, but ...
It started off well enough, with Hans' trip up into the sanatorium and his clash with the insular and insitutionalised world of the patients. There were highpoints, such as the seances, the love affair from afar with the girl who slammed doors, the time Hans got lost while out skiing in a blizzard. But the endless philosophical debates for 20 pages at a time just ground me down. It's sad to say, but I failed to appreciate this book and even to see why it is regarded as such a 'great' book (and I've read and actually thoroughly enjoyed Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick and Don Quixote). However, I will once again, no doubt, succumb and forget my lack of Mann-appeal and take down Lotte in Weimar or The Holy Sinner and plough, po-faced, through these too. Mann, like Iris Murdoch, seems to be someone I'm destined to keep returning to reluctantly.

From my subjective insight, this book is the best book ever written. The book is really about three things: time, illness, and death. If you are philosophically inclined, or if you want a book to challenge the way your perceive time this book is for you. If you want to read an entertaining novel to make you feel good about your life...or if you are looking for a book to make you relax from your job....this book is not what you seek.

Mann is able to combine words that create dazzling imagery...especially in his descriptions of various characters and the unfoldings of nature.

Well, I finally broke down and slugged my way through it. (Actually, this was attempt number two.) I may be way off, but to me this is a novelist's novel, a literary effort best appreciated by literary students and not by one who reads purely for pleasure and intellectual or artistic gratification. To someone who, like me, just likes to read and has always been curious about this book, I would suggest choosing something else.
The novel defies standard evaluation (i.e., assignment of three stars, four stars, etc.) owing to its scope and the unique nature of its aspirations. The text takes up about 1,200 pages in conventional format. (My copy is 700 pages of microscopic font crammed onto the page.) Is there 1,200 pages worth of plot in the book? Absolutely not. 1,200 pages of philosophy? Doubtful. Still, as the story's narrator explains, a person's entire life can be told in two pages, or a thousand pages could describe a single event. The book is in part a study of time and its measure - it does not seek to develop in the same manner or pace as other novels. To tell this particular story in the way Mann wants it told, a great deal of pages are indeed needed. This notwithstanding, the book is best left, in my opinion, to those who really like to make a study of what they read. Mann himself suggested reading it twice. (The only problem with this approach is that it would take 18 years of one's life.)
The book is excellent on many levels, difficult on others. As a work of art, it is unusually dense and all-encompassing. Almost against his will, the reader is drawn in as the main character's fate unfolds, brought about what one could call his willful passivity. The plot and character "development" are of fascinating, unparalleled strangeness. At the same time, assessing the novel's intended meaning is a perplexing task. The book's "hero" (for he is often referred to as such) seems to be anything but heroic. Rather, he could be seen as a walking advertisement for the perils of the undesirable traits he possesses. His defining character trait is stagnation. All of his second-hand philosophical posturing is merely a lame attempt to justify his disdain for exertion and his cowardly withdrawal from pursuing a purposeful life in the "flatland" below. (However, Mann - as well as many of the reviewers here - apparently really did consider Hans a hero engaged in the act of philosophical self-improvement. Strange.) Lacking a self, the hero's views and even personality traits are lifted from those around him. (Witness his shameless incorporation of Peepercorn's affectations.) The character most vocal in his defense of virtue (Settembrini) is, on the whole, not particularly virtuous himself. The character presented as the most virtuous (Joachim) is neither the happier nor the more prosperous for his virtue. Furthermore, it is often difficult for the reader to discern whether the narrator's praise for a character is intended to be sincere or ironic.
To a non-literati like me, the author's approach to his craft is often suspect. Momentum is often dispersed by questionable digressions; new major characters are introduced up until the end; fifteen pages are often used where three would suffice. Mann seems intent on presenting himself as a renaissance man, one who can write expertly on a plethora of subjects. He is not grandstanding or hotdogging - it's just the way he writes - but it does require patience on the part of the reader who may not particularly care to detour through a discourse on snake venom while trying to advance through the story.
Before embarking on this endeavor, I was hoping to be able to dismiss the standard Objectivist (i.e., cult of Ayn Rand) objection to this work - that the philosophizing contained within exists for its own sake and isn't integrated into the plot or theme of the novel. The criticism seems to be unjustified as the passages in question unfold. The philosophical views expressed are relevant to the theme and to the development of the characters who express them. After a while, however, I had to concede the point. On and on these dialogues go, completely dissociated from the rest of the book, requiring mental brute force just to plow through them. Score one for the Objectivists.
To the serious student of literature, I can recommend this book unequivocally. To the average reader - even a fairly serious one - the cost-benefit ratio here does not justify the considerable investment of time required to get through Mann's masterpiece. I mean, to me Crime and Punishment is a real page-turner, but I had to force my way through lengthy passages of The Magic Mountain on numerous occasions. I rate it three stars, rather than four or five, for (what I perceive to be) its literary limitations. However as I mentioned earlier, this rating is fairly arbitrary. To the right reader, this could be one of the greatest books ever written.

Like some other reviewers have said, this is not for philistines who are comparing Mann to Stephen King who writes purely to entertain us. This book is for people who enjoy to using their brain cells once in a while. Some say it's too long but they have missed the point because this book is also about Time, a subject that never gets outdated. Mann never wrote formula novels, so all his books are not exactly the same. I suppose I am biased about this writer. The man was a giant. My first copy wore out and had to buy a new one.

Dear friends, please! All of you like this book for four or five stars. Why? Just because he got a Nobel-price? That is to easy. The Magic mountain is a boring book and, beside this, is worse written. The characters are easy, not at all interesting; it is a oneway book with no theme to think about. Especially the ending is typical for Thomas Mann: He is not able to create senseful endings. Hans dies in the war (there have to be a worldwar to have a reason to finish this book)as his cousin wants to. The cousin dies in this hospital as Hans wants to.... amazingly creative :-(. And then the sentences of M. Horrible! Latest in the moment when Mann asks people to read this book at least twice, I started screaming. This is a real way of resignation. If I am not able to publish a book that is understandable the first time, I should first learn writing before acting. My wish is that people stop giving Thomas Mann a halo and all the other people getting this Nobel-price of literature. That is not the only thing to evaluate literature.
Sinceraly yours
Falkesi

I definitely enjoyed huge portions of "The Magic Mountain," but the novel, as a whole, also took a great deal of time and effort to get all the way through. There are parts of this book -- especially near the end -- that are riveting: the seance and the dual, for instance, and the snowstorm was O.K. (not as exciting as I had hoped), but this isn't a page turner. It's a treatise on the nature of time and a disjointed discussion on religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis and a little bit of history as well.

Being neither historian, philosopher nor cleric, I can't really comment on those aspects of the book other than to say I couldn't always follow the discussion, and frankly, I got bored of it from time to time. Whenever Settembrini and Naphta started pontificating, my mind tended to wander, and it became a struggle to pay attention, let alone to care.

For me, and I suspect for most readers, the more interesting portions of the story have to do with Hans Castorp and Madame Chavchat, the eccentric and annoying Peeperkorn, and the mysterious Ellen Brand. Too bad those characters don't have more to do in the story. Instead we are treated to huge doses of Settembrini, Naphta, the doctors and some of the minor characters like Frau Stohr.

Something else that I found unsatisfying were Mann's lengthy scenery descriptions. They didn't exactly make me feel as though I were there, they merely made me glance at my wristwatch. Get on with the story, already!

Overall, it's an interesting story (though near the end it reads more like a series of short stories, and less like a novel), but Mann could have used a tough editor. Seven hundred pages of this was just too much. It could have been done so much more effectively in 300 to 400 pages. By the end, you feel as though you yourself spent seven years in a sanitorium, or at least like you too might benefit from a vacation in the Alps. Who knows, perhaps that's the point!

Ah, the Magic Mountain.
It deals with the issues. The passage of time, the management of people, the different sorts of people you might meet from day to day.

Some of the passages go on these philosophical reveries, which are really great.

The issues covered are so huge, and they have so many potential connections to things, past and present, that I can scarcely get my mind around some of them.

Invariably, reading this though, I'd lose patience and have to pick up something lighter, like statistical abstracts.

Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain is the essence itself of the decadence in Europe: beauty stands so close to love and death and wanders through the enchanted situations and characters page after page, always so incredible and original in its expressions. And the declaration to Clavdia, "le toi de ma vie", is an unforgettable emotion connecting the story to absolute poetry.

I am writing this feedback solely based on the comparison another reviewer of Thomas Mann to Stephen King. The comparison is not fair to either writer. Stephen King writes contemorary american horror, Mann is an author of classical literature and he won a pulitzer prise.
This book is a masterpiece. It is a story about love unfulfilled, realition of death and sickness and about the general human condition. You will not get anything out of this book if you are not ready to recieve.

Like Thomas Mann, I have been accused of prolixity. Sadly, for me, Tom and I have only this alleged vice in common, for I claim none of his virtues. I will try to be brief, then, as penance for past sins.

_Magic Mountain_ is my favorite novel, because it is inexhaustible in the way that great art always is.

Also, I am in love with Madame Chauchat, for though I know that she is named after a machine gun, when I see her name, I always think of "warm kitty," or something like.

Despite its longueurs, _Magic Mountain_ is a snappy read, I think, and I may yet change my name, here deep in my dotage, to Peeperkorn. We all go some time, after all: why not go spicy and big?

This and Ulysses by James Joyce are full of mystic and mythical symbolism. The difference is that The Magic Mountain is easy and Ulysses is hard. But both are a must for those ready for the message. Thank you to Joseph Campbell for turning me on to these wonders. Enjoy!

I came to read this book because a recomendation of a friend , who said this was the book he liked most ever. The fact is that i had to make an incredible effort to go through its more than 800 pages. When i finished this book i felt kind a athlete who completes a supermarathon of 120 kilometers : very tired but also heroic, to have gotten to read this extreme long story which was so boring to me from the very beggining. Some may say that i am not up to understand the book. It can be true. But for now i have to express my impression. Maybe i decide to read this book again , lets say 4 years from now, and if a get then a different impression on the book i promisse to write a new review.

thomas mann was a GREAT writer, don't get me wrong. however, it is my feeling that Magic Mountain is one of the most overrated books in history. it is dull! it is boring! it inspires somnolence! and that is being polite. thomas mann wrote so many other truly wonderful books, i find it very sad when people pick up magic mountain, throw it down in disgust and never read another book by this great author. let me name a few ... Royal Highness, Buddenbrooks, Transposed Heads, the Black Swan. i have not read the joseph books because my local library has never had the first volume in the set and i can't read them out of order. good reading to you all.

What am I to say here? Well, at least I shall provide a counterpoint to these absurdly gushing reviews spread across the the store landscape. In short, this so-called "novel of ideas" is the most insipid, abstract, pettifogging work I've ever had the misfortune to plough through. Yes, yes, go on to tell me, in review after review, I'm missing its supposed "symphonic" structure and that I must bend over backward and touch my toes while reading it for a third time to fully appreciate it. Sorry, much like a Naptha or Settembrini, you're wasting your breath. This is the sort of thing schoolmarms say to students who don't fancy Jane Austen.

Not one of the characters portrayed here is convincing. They all stand out like two dimensional set pieces. This applies especially to Hans Castorp, our supposed hero. He is more like an empty vessel filled with one fluid and then another as we move from chapter to chapter. I suspect this is why this is called a "novel of ideas" even though the two prominent ideologues here, Naptha and Settembrini, as our narrator points out (as if he needed to) contradict themselves time and time again. The overall effect is a distancing of the reader from what he is reading, a very unpleasant experience.

Some of the reviewers here (whatever are they thinking?) compare this book (and favourably!) to Proust. No two different writers could possibly exist. Proust's beautiful, poetic cadences pull the reader into his world from the first pages of the Overture to the last pages of his three thousand page opus. At the end, it is no exaggeration to say that one feels as if s/he IS the narrator Marcel and has emerged from his deep contemplation of time, like him, with an entirely new perspective on the world. ----Not so here. I feel more distant from Hans than I did when I first picked the book up. And I don't feel anything but deflated by the empty chattering about time as a concept herein.

Regarding this novel as a Bildungsroman, I couldn't help thinking of how terribly it suffers in comparison to Maugham's Of Human Bondage, where, heaven forefend, things actually happen to fully threshed-out characters, to whom one can actually relate. And in which the young man of the story, Phillip Carey, is entirely sympathetic in his harrowing process of maturity. It too has its many highbrow intellectual discussions. But Phillip ingests these ideas. They become a part of him. They affect how he acts and feels during his coming of age in the world. In other words, he is everything Hans is not.

Yes, yes no doubt I'm not "getting" it, I hear readers of this review exclaiming, along with Thomas Mann, who in his Letters, recently published in English, states many times how taken aback he is that readers and critics do not realize the homoerotic feelings of Hans for his cousin, Joachim, in the book. ---Well, readers, did you "get" that part, so important to Mann?

Please, unbiased reader, DO NOT bother with this book. Read Proust. Read Maugham. Read Beatrix Potter. Read ANYTHING but this mass of boring, silly confabulations.

Now that I've offended all the Mann aficionados with this review, do carry on and crucify it by pressing the "Not Helpful" button in a sense of outrage in my insulting of your favourite book. I'm simply telling the truth. It will be worth having written it if only one dissatisfied reader, who, like myself, can not understand what all the fuss is about, appreciates it.--Please, don't tarry, declare it "moribund" and push it down the icy slopes on a toboggan.

This book will give you a true insight into what it was like to be in a TB Sanitarium which is where the story is set. Reading it is just like being there. Dull, Monotonous, Tiresome, Going on without end.... If that was Thomas Mann's mission when he wrote it, then the book is an amazing success.

Among the very worst books I have ever read. I won't detail the plot (such as it is) as others have done. I can't relate to these characters at all. A century is not necessarily a long time but in terms of attitude these people might as well be from another world.
No swearing, no rage, no hate. Conversations between characters are artifical and often just statements of politics, philosophy, religion.Endless descriptions of food eaten, clothes worn.
If this was the only book in the world I would never read a written word again I hated it that much. The author could kill people with boredom and intellectual waffle without getting to any point.He manages to say in 1000 words what another author could say in 10. Not so much a novel as a sort of encyclopedia of descriptions of the human body, attitudes to life and being bored.
Life is too short to read this.
A book like Stephen King's 'It' is worth a 5/5 for it's sense of fun, drama, depth, terror, endless stories and characters. This book is for me a 1/5

I've read this novel at least four times over the past forty years...twice within the last year. It's always made me uncomfortable in a manner that I've found it difficult to define. To some extnet, the problem has always been the two dimension characters that fail to engage. And, certainly the character of Setembrini (sp?) with his constantly referred to "plastic" or "graphic" speech (depending on how you translate the German), his tasteless toothpick, and idiotic, theatrical getures is almost terminally irritating to the extent that I find Naptha (who Mann works hard to make unpleasant) pleasant. (By the way, I don't believe Naphtha is a "terrorist" in our modern usage of the word as some here seem to feel.)

But boring characters and situations are simply a part of the literature of mittle europa. And anyone who reads much of such literature either learns to put up with it or, for whatever reason, to like it. No, I think that perhaps I have at last figured out what so puts me off. It's the personna of the narrator. He's is SO superior. The whole novel reads like it had been written by a precocious, sophomoric adolescent showing off..."Look how smart I am! Look how much cleverer and insightful than any of the characters (and you, Dear Reader) I am!" It is for me an unpleasant tone, which, combined with the rather flat characters and situations makes the novel irritating at best...and for the literate among you, yes, I know that I've just"confused" author and narrator. That is intentional as Mann seems to be using the nineteenth century narrator as author's spokesman technique.

As to Mann's wanting the reader to see a homoerotic connection between Hans and Joachim, I don't see really how it can be missed...Joachim the manly soldier, Hans the soft, gentle boy...ah, yes. It goes, I hope, without saying, that there can be homoerotic elements in a novel that is not at all gay.

It's reasonably well known that the Nobel prize for literature is awarded not for a single book, but rather for a body of work. And, anyone who knows his history knows that many classic liberals (I do not refer here to the bastardized use of the term found in contemporary politics) wanted to reintegrate Germany into the company of civilized nations after that nation's lost of stature in and after WWI. I suspect that the politics of inclusion won the Nobel Prize for Mann rather more than his actual writing.

So, why have I contined to read this novel over many years? Quite simply because of the setting. When I was a small boy there was still a tuberculosis sanitarium in the town in which I grew up. For whatever reason, the mysterious, graceful, boring life of such places has always intrigued me.

I don't know what the reviewers giving this book 4 or 5 stars normally read, but this is a completely over-blown, endlessly repetitive novel. Like watching grass grow. Worse than reading Proust and that is pretty bad. I actually read through the entire novel which proves, I guess, that I have time to throw away. At least save yourself some $$$ and get it from the library, then you won't feel as if you threw your money away AND your life.

At the risk of being labelled a Philistine, I declare that this book is one of the most insufferably boring tomes that has ever made it onto my bedside table. I admit that I only struggled my way through the first 170 pages, but that was enough to convince me that I should not waste any more minutes of my precious life wading through any more of this drivel.

I know, I have also been chastised for criticising modern art in the same way. Tracey Emin's "Unmade Bed" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" will just have to live in the pile of junk that I fail to understand.

I realise that I am in the minority, as most reviewers and professors of literature believe this to be a masterpiece, and probably the best book to come out of Germany in the twentieth century. Then again, Hans Christian Anderson's boy who recognised the nakedness of his Emperor as those around him admired the splendour and wonderful colours of their leader's new clothes, was also in the minority.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't feel too bad about my opinion of this amazing piece of creative writing. It may also explain why English literature was the only `O' Level that I failed, despite having been a prolific reader all of my life. It just happened that the books that were chosen for my studies for those exams also bored me to tears.